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NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


OUTLINES OF A COMPARATIVE INDIVIDUAL- 
ISTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY 


BY 
DR. ALFRED ‘ADLER 


Vienna 


AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION 
By 


BERNARD GLUECK, M.D. 


Senior Assistant Physician, Government Hospital for the Insane 
‚nd 


JOHN E. LIND, M.D. 


Senior Assistant Physician, Government Hospital for the Insane 





NEW YORK 


DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
1926 












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PREFACE 


After I had made the attempt to investigate in 
the “Studie über Minderwertigkeit von Or- 
ganen,” the structure and tectonic of organs in 
association with their genetic basis, their func- 
tional capability and destiny, I proceeded, sup- 
porting myself upon already available data as 
well as upon my own experience, to apply the 
same method in the study of psychopathology. 
In the book before us are embraced the most 
important results of my comparative, individual- 
psychologic studies of the neuroses. 

As was the case in the theory of somatic in- 
feriority, an empiric basis is made use of in com- 
parative individual-psychology for the purpose 
of establishing a fictive standard of normality in 
order to enable one to measure and compare with 
it grades of deviation from it. In both of these 
scientific endeavors, the comparative method of 
study reckons with the origin of phenomena, dis- 
misses from consideration the present and seeks 
to outline from them the future. This method 
of approach leads us to view the compulsion of 
evolution and the pathological elaboration as the 
result of a conflict which breaks forth in the 


PREFACE 


organic sphere for the purpose of attaining equi- 
poise, functional capability and adaptation; the 
same struggle in the psychic sphere is under the 
command of a fictitious idea of personality whose 
influence dominates the development of the 
neurotic character and symptoms. If in the 
organic sphere, “the individual develops into a 
unit mass in which all of the individual parts co- 
operate toward a common goal” (Virchow), if 
the various abilities and tendencies of the indi- 
vidual tend toward a purposefully directed, unit- 
personality, then we may look upon every single 
manifestation of life as if in its past, present and 
future there are contained traces of a dominating, 
guiding idea. 

In this way it has appeared to the author of this 
book, that the most minute trait of psychic life 
is permeated by a purpose-force. Comparative, 
individualistic psychology sees in every psychic 
event the impress, so to speak, or symbol of a 
uniformly directed plan of life which only comes 
more clearly to light in the neuroses and 
psychoses. 

The result of such an investigation of the 
neurotic character should furnish proof of the 
value and utility of our method of comparative, 
individualistic psychology in the problems of 
mental life. THE AUTHOR. 
Vienna, February, 1912. 


INTRODUCTION 


“Omnia ex opinione suspensa sunt: non ambitio 
tantum ad illam respicit et luxuria et avaricia. Ad 
opinionem dolemus. Tam miser est quisque, quam 
credidit.” 

SENECA, Epist. 78, 13. 


The study of the neurotic character is an éssen- 
tial part of neuro-psychology. Like all other 
psychic phenomena it can only be understood 
when taken in connection with the entire psychic 
life. A cursory knowledge of the neuroses suf- 
fices to enable one to discover that which is pe- 
culiarly characteristic in them and all writers 
who have studied the problem of nervousness 
have laid particular stress upon certain peculiar 
traits of character. ‘The opinion was a general 
one that the neurotic shows a series of sharply 
emphasized traits of character which exceed the 
normal standard. The marked sensitiveness, 
the irritable debility, the suggestibility, the ego- 
tism, the penchant for the fantastic, the estrange- 
ment from reality, but also more special traits 
such as tyranny, malevolence, a self-sacrificing 
virtue, coquetry, anxiety and absent-mindedness 

V 


vi INTRODUCTION 


are met with in the majority of case histories and 
it would be necessary to detail all writers who 
have thoroughly studied the subject in order to 
endorse their contributions. Of the more recent 
ones, Janet, who has carried on the traditions of 
the famous French school and who has brought 
to light some very important and ingenious 
analyses, must be especially mentioned. His 
emphasis of the neurotic’s “sentiment d’incomple- 
tude” particularly, is so wholly in harmony with 
the results offered by me that I am justified in 
seeing in my work an extension of this most im- 
portant fundamental fact of the mental life of the 
neurotic. 

No matter where one begins with the analysis 
of psychogenic disorders, one and the same phe- 
nomenon forces itself upon one’s attention after 
the briefest observation, namely, that the entire 
picture of the neurosis as well as all its symptoms 
are influenced by, nay, even wholly provoked by 
an imaginary fictitious goal. This final purpose 
has a creative, directive and adjustive power. 
The potency of this “goal idea” is revealed to us 
by the trend and evaluation of the pathological 
phenomena and should one attempt to dispense 
with this assumption there remains nothing but a 
confusing mass of impulses, trends, components, 
debilities and anomalies which has made the ob- 
scurity of the neurosis impenetrable to some, while 


INTRODUCTION vii 


others have undertaken bold exploratory jour- 
neys into this field. 

Pierre Janet has certainly recognized this rela- 
tionship as is shown in his classical descriptions of 
the “Hysterical Psyche,” 1894,* but he avoided a 
detailed description. He expressly maintains, 
“T have until now only described general and sim- 
ple traits of character which by means of their as- 
sociation and under the influence of definite ex- 
traneous circumstances may produce all kinds of 
curious behavior and conduct.” It is entirely out 
of place here to enter into a detailed discussion of 
Janet’s description for this treatise would then 
resemble more a moral romance than a clinical 
study. Having adhered to this attitude even up 
to his latest contributions on the subject, Janet, 
notwithstanding his keen insight into the rela- 
tionship between the psychology of the neuroses 
and moral philosophy, never entered the road to 
synthesis. 

It remained for Joseph Breuer, a man well 
versed in current German philosophy, to discover 
the gem which lay in his path. He directed his 
attention to the meaning of the symptoms and 
undertook to ascertain the source and purpose of 
the same from the only one who could give them 
—from the patient. In so doing the author 
founded a method which seeks to explain indi- 

1Translated by Dr. Max Kahane. 


viii INTRODUCTION 


vidual psychological phenomena historically and 
genetically with the assistance of a preliminary 
hypothesis, i.e., that of the determinism of psychic 
phenomena. The manner in which this method 
has been extended and improved upon by Sig- 
mund Freud with the host of problems and at- 
tempted solutions therewith connected belongs to 
contemporaneous history and has met with both 
recognition and contradiction. Less for the pur- 
pose of following a critical bent than for the pur- 
pose of making clear my own position I beg leave 
to separate from the fruitful and valuable contri- 
butions of Freud three of his fundamental views 
as erroneous inasmuch as they threaten to impede 
progress in the understanding of the neuroses. 
The first objection is directed against the view 
that the libido is the motive force behind the phe- 
nomena of the neurosis. On the contrary it is 
the neurosis which shows more clearly than does 
normal psychic conduct how by means of this 
neurotic positing of a “final purpose,” the apper- 
ception of pleasure, its selection and power are 
all driven in the direction of this final purpose so 
that the neurotic can really only follow the allure- 
ment of the acquisition of pleasure with his 
healthy psychic force, so to speak, while for the 
neurotic portion only “higher” goals are of value. 

The neurotic goal (Zwecksetzung) has re- 
vealed itself to us in the heightened ego-conscious- 


INTRODUCTION ix 


ness (Persönlichkeitsgefühl) whose simplest for- 
mula is to be recognized in an exaggerated “mas- 
culine protest” (Männlichen Protest). This 
formula: “I wish to be a complete man” is the 
guiding fiction in every neurosis, claiming higher 
reality values than even the normal psyche. ‘The 
libido, the sex-impulses and the tendencies to sex- 
ual perversions arrange themselves in accord- 
ance with this guiding principle, no matter 
whence they originate. Nietzsche’s “Will to 
power” and “Will to seem” embrace many of our 
views, which again resemble in some respects the 
views of Féré and the older writers, according to 
whom the sensation of pleasure originates in a 
feeling of power, that of pain in a feeling of fee- 
bleness (Ohnmacht). 

A second objection is directed against Freud’s 
fundamental view of the sexual etiology of the 
neuroses, a view which Pierre Janet approached 
very closely when he asked, “Is sexual feeling 
then the center around which all other psycholog- 
ical syntheses are built up?” The applicability 
of the sexual picture deceives the normal person 
and especially the neurotic. But it must not de- 
ceive the psychologist. The sexual content in the 
neurotic phenomenon originates primarily in the 
imaginary antithesis: “Masculine-feminine” and 
is evolved through a change of form of the “mas- 
culine protest.” The sexual trend in the fantasy 


x INTRODUCTION 


and life of the neurotic follows the direction of 
the “masculine goal,” and is really not a trend, 
but a compulsion. The whole picture of the 
sexual neurosis is nothing more than a portrait 
depicting the distance which the patient is re- 
moved from the imaginary masculine goal and the 
manner in which he seeks to bridge it. It is 
strange that Freud, a skillful connoisseur of the 
symbolic in life, was not able to discover the sym- 
bolic in “sexual apperception,” to recognize the 
sexual as a jargon, a modus dicendi. But we can 
understand this when we take into consideration 
the more extensive basic error, 1.e., the assumption 
that the neurotic is under the influence of infan- 
tile wishes, which come to life nightly (Dream 
theory) as well as in connection with certain oc- 
casions in life. In reality these infantile wishes 
already stand under the compulsion of the imag- 
inary goal and themselves usually bear the char- 
acter of a guiding thought suitably arrayed, and 
adapt themselves to symbolic expression purely 
for reasons of thought economy. A sickly girl 
who during her entire childhood in her conscious- 
ness of an unusual insecurity leans upon her 
father and in so doing strives to become superior 
to her mother, may comprehend this psychic con- 
stellation in the form of an incest, as if she wished 
to be the wife of her father. Thereby the goal 
is both attained and effective; her insecurity is 


INTRODUCTION xi 


only abolished when she is with her father. Her 
developed psycho-motor intelligence, her uncon- 
sciously active memory combats all feelings of 
uncertainty with the same aggression, with the 
adequate expedient, to take refuge in the father 
as if she were his wife. There she finds that 
heightened ego-consciousness which she has set 
for her goal, which she has borrowed from the 
masculine ideal of childhood, from the over-com- 
pensation of her feeling of inferiority. If she 
recoils from a proffer of love or marriage, threat- 
ening her as they do with a fresh lowering of her 
ego-consciousness, she acts symbolically, and all 
her defensive resources and her predispositions 
become arrayed against a female destiny and 
make her seek security where she has always 
found it, with her father. She utilizes an expe- 
dient, behaves in accordance with a senseless fic- 
tion, but is nevertheless certain of attaining her 
goal. The greater her feeling of uncertainty, the 
more firmly this girl clings to her fiction, en- 
deavors to take it quite literally and since human 
thinking favors symbolic abstraction the patient 
with a little effort (and also the analyst) is suc- 
cessful in the longing of neurotics, namely, to find 
security, to gain a foothold in the symbolic pic- 
ture of incestuous emotion. 

Freud was obliged to see in this purposeful 
manifestation a reanimation of infantile wishes 


xii INTRODUCTION 


because according to him the latter are to be 
looked upon as motive forces. We recognize in 
this infantile mode of procedure, in the extensive 
use of safety-devices (Hilfsconstructionen), in 
which light the neurotic fiction is to be regarded, 
in the many-sided motor preparedness which 
reaches into the remote past, in the strong tend- 
ency to abstraction and symbolization, the most 
useful expedient of the neurotic, who strives to- 
ward security, toward a maximation of his ego, 
toward the masculine protest. 

If we attach to these critical remarks the ques- 
tion of how the neurotic phenomena come into 
being, why the patient wills to be a man and con- 
stantly seeks to adduce proof thereof, whence he 
has the stronger necessity for ego-consciousness, 
why he makes such strong endeavors to gain se- 
curity, in short, if we inquire into the final reasons 
for these devices of the neurotic psyche, we may 
conjecture that which is revealed by every analy- 
sis, namely, that at the onset of the development 
of a neurosis there stands threateningly the feel- 
ing of uncertainty and inferiority and demands 
insistently a guiding, assuring and tranquilizing 
positing of a goal in order to render life bearable. 
Among these are especially prominent safety 
devices and fictions in thought, action and voli- 
tion. 

It is clear that this sort of psyche, directed as it 


INTRODUCTION xiii 


is with especial force toward a heightening of the 
ego, will, aside from specific neurotic symptoms, 
make itself conspicuous in society because of its 
evident inability to adapt itself. ‘The conscious- 
ness of the weak point dominates the neurotic to 
such a degree that often without knowing it he 
begins to construct with all his might the protect- 
ing superstructure. Along with this his sensi- 
tiveness becomes more acute, he learns to pay at- 
tention to relationships which still escape others, 
he exaggerates his cautiousness, begins to antici- 
pate all sorts of disagreeable consequences in 
starting out to do something or in experiencing 
an injury, he endeavors to hear further and to see 
further, belittles himself, becomes insatiable, eco- 
nomical, constantly strives to extend the bounda- 
ries of his influence and power over space and time 
and at the same time loses that peace of mind and 
freedom from prejudice which above all guaran- 
tee mental health. His mistrust of himself and 
others, his envy and maliciousness, become grad- 
ually more pronounced, aggressive and cruel 
tendencies which are to secure for him supremacy 
over his environment, gain the upper hand, or he 
endeavors to captivate and conquer others by 
means of greater obedience, submission and hu- 
mility which not infrequently degenerate into 
masochistic traits; thus both heightened activity 
as well as increased passivity are expedients 


xiv INTRODUCTION 


ushered in by the fictitious goal of an increased 
power, of a desire to be above, of the masculine 
protest. 

Thus we have arrived at those psychic phenom- 
ena, at the neurotic character, the discussion of 
which forms the content of this book. None of 
_ the neurotic’s traits of character are essentially 
| new. He shows no single trait which cannot like- 
wise be demonstrated in the healthy individual, 
although at times it becomes understandable for 
the physician as well as the patient only through 
analysis. It is uninterruptedly “sensitized,” 
thrust forward like an outpost, and represents the 
sounding of the environment and the future. 
The knowledge of these psychic dexterities, which 
protrude far and wide, like sensitive antenne, 
first makes possible the understanding of the 
neurotic’s struggle with his fate, of his stimulated 
aggressive tendency, his unrest and impatience. 
For these antenne test all the phenomena of the 
environment and examine them constantly for 
their advantages and disadvantages with regard 
to the assumed goal. They create the keen sense 
for estimate and comparison, awaken, by means 
of the attention active in them, fear, hope, doubt, 
expectations of all sorts and seek to ensure the 
psyche against surprise and against a lowering 
of the ego-consciousness. They put forth the 
most accessible motor dexterities, ever mobile, 


INTRODUCTION KV 


ever ready to prevent a degradation of the per- 
son. The forces of internal and external expe- 
rience are active in them, they are filled with 
memory-rests of fear—inspiring as well as con- 
soling experiences, the reminiscences of which 
they have changed into dexterities. Categorical 
imperatives of the second rank, they do not serve 
to bring about their own existence, but in the last 
analysis cause an elevation of the ego-conscious- 
ness and they attempt this by making possible the 
discovery in the unrest and uncertainty of life, of 
guiding principles, by facilitating the differentia- 
tion between right and wrong, up and down, right 
and left. The accentuated traits of character are 
to be found already in the neurotic disposition 
where they give rise to peculiarities and perver- 
sions of conduct. These become still more pro- 
nounced when after a more severe attack or after 
the emergence of a contradiction in the masculine 
protest, the craving for security (Sicherungsten- 
denz) asserts itself and simultaneously calls forth 
symptoms as new, effective expedients. They 
are largely constructed after models and patterns 
and have for their object the initiation in every 
new situation of the struggle for the preservation 
of the ego and victory for it. In their influence 
lies the reason for the exaggerated affectivity and 
lowered threshold of stimulation in contrast with 
normal individuals. It goes without saying that 


Xvi INTRODUCTION 


the neurotic character, too, develops out of ma- 
terial already at hand, out of psychic impulses 
and metamorphosing experiences of the somatic 
functions. 

All these psychic dexterities, standing as they 
do in close contact with the outside world, become 
neurotic only when an inner want accentuates the 
craving for security which in turn more effec- 
tively constructs and mobilizes the traits of char- 
acter only when the fictitious object of life oper- 
ates more dogmatically and strengthens those 
secondary guiding principles which are in accord 
with the traits of character. It is then that the 
hypostatization of the character sets in, its trans- 
formation from a means to a goal leads to an in- 
dependence of existence and a sort of deification 
lends to it unchangeability and eternal worth. 
The neurotic character is thus incapable of ad- 
justing itself to reality because it is always striv- 
ing toward an impossible ideal. It is a product 
' and instrument of a cautious psyche which 
strengthens its guiding principle for the purpose 
of ridding itself of a feeling of inferiority, an at- 
tempt which is destined to be wrecked as a con- 
sequence of inner contradiction, on the barriers 
of civilization or on the rights of others. Analo- 
gous to the groping gestures, pose in facing the 
rear, to the bodily attitude in the act of aggres- 
sion, like mimicry as a form of expression and in- 


INTRODUCTION xvii 


strument of motility, so the traits of character, 
especially the neurotic ones, serve as a psychic 
means and form of expression for the purpose of 
entering into an account with life, for the pur- 
pose of assuming an attitude, of gaining a fixed 
point in the vicissitudes of life, for the purpose 
of reaching that security-giving goal, the feeling 
of superiority. 

Thus we have unmasked the neurotic character 
as the servant of an imaginary goal and have 
established its dependence upon a final purpose. 
It has not sprung up independently out of any 
sort of biological or constitutional primitive force, 
but has received direction and motivation from 
the compensatory superstructure and the sche- 
matic guiding principle. Its emergence took 
place under the pressure of uncertainty, its tend- 
ency to personify itself is the doubtful success 
of the craving for security. This course of the 
neurotic character has received through the posit- 
ing of a final purpose its destination which is the 
masculine main principle and thus every neurotic 
tendency betrays to us by its direction that it is 
impregnated with the masculine protest which 
seeks to make of it an unfailing instrument for 
the purpose of excluding from experience every 
permanent degradation. 

In the practical part of this book will be shown 
by means of a series of cases how the “neurotic 


xviii INTRODUCTION 


scheme” calls forth special psycho-pathological 
constellations, namely, through the apperception 
of experiences by means of the neurotic char- 
acter. 


INTRODUCTION 


Since the inception of the psychoanalytic 
movement its students have shown a remark- 
able activity in applying the principles of inter- 
pretation originally enunciated by Freud over 
a wide field of human endeavor, and thus not 
only have the neurotic and the psychotic come 
under the critical survey of the analyst, but the 
whole course of cultural development has been 
subjected to inquiry along these lines. In addi- 
tion to this growth in the extent of the movement 
it has manifested what seems to me to be a very 
healthy tendency, namely, it has shown an in- 
clination to put forth suggestions as to new meth- 
ods of approach to the problems, represented 
here and there by groups of workers who have 
tended to depart more or less from the original 
formulations as laid down by Freud. One of 
the most stimulating and valuable points of view 
which have been developed in this way is that 
of Alfred Adler, of Vienna, a translation of 
whose work on the characteristics of the neurotic 
character is offered in the following pages. 

The distinctive feature of Adler’s approach to 
the problem of the neurotic character traits is 
that it approaches from the organic rather than 
from the functional side and in this way, I think, 
affords a very valuable viewpoint because it 
tends to bring together the organicist and the 


X1X 


xx INTRODUCTION 


functionalist, who have been too long separated 
by the misconception of irreconcilable differ- 
ences between mind and body. No small part of 
the opposition to the whole psychological move- 
ment, as represented in psychoanalysis, has come 
from the inability of the man who has been 
brought up to look at things from the point of 
view of the internist -to be able to accept many 
of the clinical observations which were offered 
and which tended to show the development of 
clearly organic disorders as a result of a dis- 
turbance in the psyche. Adler’s approach to the 
psychoanalytic problems is admirably calculated 
to break down such prejudices. 

In this book, however, the working out of the 
significance of the various neurotic character 
traits has been by ringing the changes on the 
basic formulation of what Adler calls the mascu- 
line protest. It is as if the neurotic said to 
himself, “ I wish to be a complete man.” This 
protest arises on the basis of a feeling of in- 
feriority and an effort upon the part of the 
neurotic to correct this feeling, which he does 
by so ordering his life, so regulating his every 
act that he may find that security of which the 
feeling of inferiority has robbed him. This is the 
fictitious goal of the neurotic and the funda- 
mental and ultimate cause of his symptoms when 
he is no longer able to succeed, when failure 
threatens in his efforts to deal with reality. 

For Adler the neurosis or the psychosis is 
comparable to the work of art, but has been 
built up in response to a fictitious goal which 


INTRODUCTION xxi 


collects and unites into a group those psychic 
elements of which it can make use, collecting 
only those which promise results in the effort 
at the attainment of security. ‘The attempt to 
attain to the maximation of his ego fails because 
directed along a false path. The neurosis or 
psychosis is therefore a constructive creation, a 
compensation product, which, however, fails be- 
cause of its false direction. 

All this is very psychological and does not 
bear out what I have said about it to the effect 
that Adler’s approach is from the organic side. 
This particular book, however, stresses the psy- 
chological formula. In his earlier work on organ 
inferiority * the organic basis of this psycho- 
logical formulation is founded. The feeling of 
inferiority, which underlies the masculine pro- 
test, has its raison d’etre in an inferior organ. 

In this work he has gone to considerable ex- 
tent in working over the psychological charac- 
teristics of persons who have had demonstrably 
inferior organs, either clinically evident or show- 
ing up at autopsy. From this work he believes 
he has been able to show that the predominant 
traits of character are the result of an effort on 
the part of the individual to overcome a feeling 
of inferiority resulting from an inferior organ. 
Many examples might be given, and in fact they 
come within the ken of every one, which demon- 
strate the validity of this point of view. A 
classical example is that of Demosthenes, a stam- 


1Translation in preparation, as Number 24 of the Nervous and 
Mental Disease Monograph Series. 


xxi INTRODUCTION 


merer, who became the greatest orator of Greece. 
Adler believes that defects of this sort nucleate, 
so to say, the feeling of inferiority and force 
the individual to make supreme efforts to over- 
come his particular defect and in this way, as 
a result of these efforts, the inferior organ, by 
the development of a highly differentiated nerv- 
ous superstructure, may actually become super- 
normal, a result which we are familiar with, for 
example, in the remarkable facility with which 
blind people gain information through their 
supersensitized touch organs. In other words, to 
use the language of current psychoanalysis, the 
organ inferiority is the basic factor of what the 
Freudians refer to as the conflict. 

These two works of Adler’s, therefore, give 
the organic basis and the psychological elabora- 
tion of his opinions. The neurotic constitution 
founds in an inferior organ, the inferior organ 
produces a feeling of inferiority, the feeling 
of inferiority—the masculine protest—becomes 
the fictitious goal of the neurotic, whose symp- 
toms result from an effort to mould reality along 
this false pathway. 

To those who follow Adler through the vari- 
ous ramifications of his hypothesis, who read 
sympathetically his numerous case reports which 
he offers to substantiate his views, there can be 
no doubt but that the angle from which he looks 
at the problem of the neuroses and the psychoses 
lets us see new aspects of these phenomena which 
are exceedingly helpful to us in our effort to 
grasp their meanings. It will also be perfectly 


INTRODUCTION xxiii 


evident that the helpfulness of the Adler theories 
is in the orientation which the physician gets 
towards the problem presented by the patient, 
whether he approach it from the point of view of 
the internist or of the psychologist. Adler’s 
theories are admirably calculated to help the 
internist to grasp the possibilities of organ in- 
feriority as they may affect the psyche and to 
help the psychoanalyst to grasp the origin and 
meanings of the neurosis as he sees it at the 
psychological level and perhaps to see more 
clearly upon what his limitations are based. In 
any event the two groups of physicians, hereto- 
fore separated all too far, both in theory and 
practice, may find in Adler’s views a common 
ground upon which to meet. 
WiıLLIıam A. WHITE. 
SAINT ELIZABETH’s HosPITAL, 
WasuHineTon, D. C, 
October 23, 1916. 


CHAPTER 


II 


III 


CONTENTS 


PREFACE 


THEORETICAL PART 
INTRODUCTION 


The Origin and Development of the Feeling of 
Inferiority and the Consequences Thereof 


Psychic Compensation and its Synthesis 


The Accentuated Fiction as the ee Idea 
in the Neurosis : 


PRACTICAL PART 


Avarice, Suspiciousness, Envy, Cruelty, The 
derogatory critique of the neurotic, neurotic 
apperception, senile neuroses, changes in the 
form and intensity of the fiction. Somatic 
jargon (organ-jargon) 


The neurotic extension of limits through asceti- 
cism, love, desire to travel, crime. Simula- 
tion and neurosis. Feeling of inferiority of 
the female sex. Purpose of an ideal. Doubt 
as an expression of psychic hermaphroditism. 
Masturbation and neurosis. The incest-com- 
plex as a symbol of craving for dominancy. 
The nature of the delirium. (Delirium used 
in the sense of the French une Delire) . 


Neurotic principles: sympathy, coquetry, nar- 
cissism, Psychic hermaphroditism, Halluci- 
natory security, Virtue, conscience, pedantry, 
fanatic attachment to truth Vets 


35 


öl 


127 


208 


. 246 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 


IV The derogatory tendency to disparage others; 


Obstinacy and wildness; The sexual rela- 
tions of neurotics as a means of comparison; 
Symbolic emasculation; Feeling of being be- 
littled; Equality to man as a life-plan; Simu- 
lation and neurosis; Substitute for masculin- 
ity; Impatience; Discontent; Inaccessibility 281 


V Cruelty. Conscience. Perversion and neurosis 324 


VI 


VII 


VIII 


IX 


The antithesis above-beneath, Choice of a 
profession, Somnambulism, Antithesis in 
thought, Elevation of the personality through 
the disparagement of others, Jealousy, Neu- 
rotic auxiliaries, Authoritativeness, Thinking 
in antithesis and the masculine protest, Dila- 
tory attitude and marriage, The tendency up- 
ward as a symbol of life, Compulsion to 
masturbation, The neurotic striving for 
knowledgen.. m Sian und na ge em ta 


Punctuality, The will to be first, Homosexual- 
ity and perversion as a symbol, Modesty and 
exhibitionism, Constancy and inconstancy, 
JEALOUS. eine eis ende | eens ea» Kae Ra Oe 


Fear of the partner; The ideal in the neurosis; 
Insomnia and compulsion to sleep; Neurotic 
comparison of man and woman; Forms of the 
fear of) the) wife se) an aden veer nis oe eee 


Self-reproaches, self-torture, Contrition and 
asceticism, Flagellation, Neuroses in chil- 
dren; Suicide and suicidal ideas . . . . 412 


The neurotic’s esprit de famille, Refractoriness 
and obedience, Silence and loquaciousness, 
The tendency to, contrariness . . ...436 


Conclusion PP mer AES gare Pe cae AR REN 24 KO ta ER 


Authors’ Contributions referred to in this book 447 


THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


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Keely as i Pe 


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NZ sh bs ci om Ay 
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THE 
NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


CHAPTER I 


THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING OF 
INFERIORITY AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF 


Tue facts established through my study of 
somatic inferiority (vide Studie, l.c.) concerned 
themselves with the causes, the behavior, the man- 
ifestations and altered mode of activity of in- 
feriorily developed organs and has led me to as- 
sume the idea of “compensation through the 
central nervous system” with which were linked 
certain discussions of the subject of psychogene- 
SIS. 

There came to light a remarkable relationship 
between somatic inferiority and psychic overcom- 
pensation, so that I gained a fundamental view- 
point, namely, that the realization of somatic in- 
feriority by the individual becomes for him a 
permanent impelling force for the development 
of his psyche. 

Physiologically there results from this a reén- 

1 


2 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


forcement of the nerve tracts, both quantitatively 
and qualitatively, whereby a concomitant original 
inferiority of these tracts is enabled to reveal in 
a composite picture its tectonic and functional 
peculiarities. 

The psychic phase of this compensation and 
overcompensation can only be disclosed by means 
of psychologic investigation and analysis. 

As I have given a detailed description of organ- 
inferiority as the etiology of the neuroses in my 
former contributions, especially in the “Studie,” 
in the “Ageressionstrieb,” in “Psychischen Her- 
maphroditismus,” in the “Neurotischen Disposi- 
tion” and in the “Psychischen Behandlung der 
Trigeminusneuralgie,” I may in the present de- 
scription confine myself to those points which 
promise a further elucidation of the relationship 
between somatic-inferiority and psychic compen- 
sation and which are of importance in the study 
of the neurotic character. 

Summarizing, I lay stress on the fact that 
organ-inferiority, as described by me, includes the 
incompleteness in such organs, the frequently 
demonstrable arrests of development or func- 
tional maturity, the functional failure in the post- 
fetal period and the fetal character of organs and 
systems of organs; on the other hand the accen- 
tuation of their developmental tendency in the 
presence of compensatory and coördinating 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 3 


forces and the frequent bringing about of in- 
creased functional activity. One may easily de- 
tect in every instance from observation of the 
child and from the anamneses of the adult that 
the possession of definitely inferior organs is re- 
flected upon the psyche—and in such a way as to 
lower the self-esteem, to raise the child’s psycho- 
logical uncertainty; but it is just out of this 
lowered self-esteem that there arises the struggle 
for self-assertion which assumes forms much more 
intense than one would expect. As the compen- 
sated inferior organ gains in the scope of activity 
both qualitatively and quantitatively and acquires 
protective means from itself as well as from the 
entire organism, the predisposed child in his sense 
of inferiority selects out of his psychic resources 
expedients for the raising of his own value which 
are frequently striking in nature and among 
which may be noted as occupying the most prom- 
inent places those of a neurotic and psychotic 
character. 

Ideas concerning innate inferiority, predispo- 
sition, and constitutional weakness may be found 
even in the very beginnings of scientific medicine. 
In leaving out of discussion here many note- 
worthy contributions, although they frequently 
contained fundamental viewpoints, we do so 
solely because the relationship between organic 
and psychic disease states, albeit dwelt upon, was 


4 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


never explained. In this class belong all view- 
points of pathology which are founded upon a 
general assumption of degeneracy. Stiller’s 
theory of the asthenic habitus goes considerably 
further and almost attempts to establish etiologi- 
cal relationships. Anton’s compensation theory 
confines itself all too-closely to correlation systems 
within the central nervous system; nevertheless, 
he, as well as his talented pupil, Otto Gross, have 
made noteworthy attempts to bring about on this 
basis a clearer understanding of certain psychotic 
states. Bouchard’s bradytrophy, the exudative 
diathesis described by Ponflick, Escherich, 
Czerny, Moro and Striimpel, and interpreted by 
them as a disease-producing diathesis, Comby’s 
infantile arthritism, Kreibich’s angio-neurotic 
diathesis, Heubner’s lymphatism, Poltauf’s status 
thymico-lymphaticus, Escherich’s spasmophilia 
and Hess-Eppinger’s vagotonia are successful 
attempts of recent decades to describe disease 
states associated with congenital inferiority. 

All of them refer to heredity and infantile 
characteristics. But, although the vague and in- 
constant limits of the predispositions in question 
are emphasized by the authors themselves, the 
impression is not to be ignored that certain con- 
spicuous types have been isolated which in the 
course cf time will be brought within one large 
group, namely, that of the minus-variants. Of 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 5 


extreme importance for the understanding of 
congenital inferiority and predisposition to dis- 
ease are the researches into the glands of internal 
secretion in which morphologic as well as func- 
tional deviations have been discovered, e.g., the 
thyroids, the parathyroids, the sex glands, the 
chromaffin system and the hypophysis. Consid- 
ered from the standpoint of their organ-inferiori- 
ties the orientation of the composite picture be- 
comes easier and the relationship to compensation 
and correlation in the economy of the entire body 
becomes clearer. Among the remaining inves- 
tigators who took as the basis for their views not 
a primum-movens, but a combined influence of 
various organ-inferiorities and mutual interac- 
tion of the same, Martius, above all, must be men- 
tioned. In my contribution on “The Inferiority 
of Organs” (1907), the idea of the coordination 
of the coexisting inferiorities likewise appears 
prominently. ‘The fact is not to be lightly evalu- 
ated that the simultaneously existing organ-in- 
feriorities stand in relation to one another as if 
united by a secret bond. 

Bartel likewise has extended his theories con- 
cerning the status thymico-lymphaticus, which 
represents a considerable advance in science, to 
such limits as to invade the boundaries of the sys- 
tems of other authors. Kyrle too, supporting 
himself by the newly discovered pathological find- 


6 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ings, reached quite independently conclusions 
identical with mine, namely, that the codrdination 
of the inferiority of the sexual apparatus with 
other organ-inferiorities, though frequently only 
slightly developed, is nevertheless so often found 
to exist that I must maintain that there exist no 
organ-inferiorities without an accompanying de- 
fect in the sexual apparatus. 

Because of some future considerations I must 
also mention certain of the views of Freud who 
assumes a sexual constitution as the basis of the 
neuroses and psychoses, under which term he un- 
derstands a qualitatively and quanitatively vary- 
ing arrangement of partial sex impulses. This 
assumption simply corresponds to a postulate ad- 
vanced by him for his other views. The develop- 
ment of perverse inclinations and their unsuccess- 
ful repression into the unconscious furnishes, ac- 
cording to him, the picture of the neurosis, and in 
itself forms the primary cause for the neurotic 
psyche. We shall see from our considerations 
that perversion so far as it reaches development 
in the neurosis and psychosis is not dependent 
upon a connate impulse, but that it arises from 
the striving towards a fictitious goal in connection 
with which the repression takes place as a by- 
product under the pressure of the self-conscious- 
ness. 

That which, however, is to be taken cognizance 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 7 


of biologically in an originally abnormal sexual 
conduct, namely, the greater or lesser sensitive- 
ness, the heightened or lowered reflex activity, 
the functional valency as well as the compensa- 
tory psychic superstructure indicates directly as I 
have shown in my “Studie” a congenital defect of 
the sexual organ. 

Concerning the nature of the predisposition to 
disease dependent upon organ-inferiority there 
exists a unanimity of opinion. The standpoint 
assumed by me (“Studie,” J.c.) emphasizes more 
strongly than does that of other authors, the as- 
surance of an adjustment through compensation. 
With the release from the maternal organism 
there begins for these inferior organs or systems 
of organs the struggle with the outside world, 
which must of necessity ensue and which is initi- 
ated with greater vehemence than in the more 
normally developed apparatus. This struggle is 
accompanied by greater mortality and morbidity 
rates. This fetal character, however, at the same 
time furnishes the increased possibility for com- 
pensation and over-compensation, increases the 
adaptability to ordinary and extraordinary resist- 
ances and assures the attainment of new and 
higher forms, new and higher accomplishments. 

Thus the inferior organs furnish the inexhaust- 
ible material by means of which the organism 
continuously seeks to reach a better accord with 


8 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


the altered conditions of life through adapta- 
tion, repudiation, and improvement. Its hyper- 
valency is deeply rooted in the compulsion of a 
constant training, in the variability and greater 
tendency to growth, frequently associated with 
inferior organs, and in the more facile evolution 
of the appertaining. nervous and psychic com- 
plexes, on account of the introspection and con- 
centration bestowed on them. The evils of con- 
stitutional inferiority manifest themselves in the 
most varied diseases and predispositions to dis- 
ease. 

At times various somatic or mental disabilities 
develop, at other times an over-irritability of the 
nerve tracts, then again clumsiness of manner, 
ungainliness, precocity. A host of childhood de- 
fects codperate with the predisposition to disease 
and form a close union, as I have shown, with the 
organic or functional inferiority. Strabismus, 
anomalies of refraction of the visual apparatus or 
photophobia with its train of symptoms, deaf- 
mutism, stuttering and other defects of speech, 
difficulty of hearing, the organic and psychic de- 
fects which go with adenoid vegetations, the com- 
plete aprosexia, the frequent affections of the 
sensory organs, of the respiratory and digestive 
tracts, striking ugliness and deformities, periph- 
eral stigmata of degeneration and nevi which 
may indicate more profound organ-inferiorities 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 9 


(Alder, Schmidt). Hydrocephalus, rickets, 
anomalies of stature as scoliosis, round shoulders, 
genu varus or valgus, pes varus or valgus, a pro- 
tracted incontinence of feces and urine, malfor- 
mations of the genitals, results of small arteries 
(Virchow) and the numerous consequences of 
defects of the internal secretory glands as de- 
scribed by Wagner v. Yauregg, Frankl v. Hoch- 
wert, Chvostek, Bartel, Escherich, Pineles and 
others, all of which reveal in their great abun- 
dance, in the variety of their combinations, the 
large sphere of disease manifestations as disclosed 
to the physician through an understanding of 
organ-inferiority. It was especially pediatrists 
and pathologists who first noted these relation- 
ships. But the concept of degeneracy has like- 
wise become of increasing importance to neu- 
rology and psychiatry. The line of advance 
stretches all the way from Morel’s theory of the 
stigmata of degeneration to the consideration of 
nervous diseases from the standpoint of an in- 
ferior constitution. We need only consider the 
statistical study of Thiemich-Birks and Potpesch- 
nigg’s contributions (cited by Gott) concerning 
the fate of children who were treated in the first 
and second years of their lives for tetanoid con- 
vulsions. Of these children only a small number 
became entirely well. In most instances there 
were found later definite signs of somatic and 


10 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


psychic inferiority, psychopathic and neuropathic 
characteristics. As such, these authors mention 
infantilism, squints, difficulty of hearing, speech 
defects, feeble-mindedness, disturbances of sleep, 
pavor nocturnus, somnambulism, enuresis, exag- 
gerated reflexes, tics, paroxysms of rage, truancy, 
timidity, pathological lying and habitual fugues. 
Gott as well as other authors reached the con- 
clusion that in spasmophilie children there exists 
a predisposition to severe neurotic and psycho- 
pathic states. Czerny and others maintain that 
a similar relationship may be found in children 
suffering from gastro-intestinal disorders. 
Bartel was able to discover among suicides a 
considerable preponderance of the status thymico- 
lymphaticus, especially a hypoplasia of the sexual 
organs. The existence of somatic inferiority 
among juvenile suicides was shown by me, Net- 
slitzky and others. Frankl v. Hochwert de- 
scribed states of excitement, irritability and hal- 
lucinatory confusion, in tetany. French writers 
(cited from Pfaundler) ascribe to the torpid 
habitus of children, moroseness, indolence, sleepi- 
ness, distractibility, stupidity and phlegmatism, 
to the erotistic type, restlessness, liveliness, irri- 
tability, precocity, moodiness, affectivity, unso- 
ciability, peculiarity of disposition and one-sided 
development. Pfaundler emphasizes the harass- 
ing, tormenting and painful influences to which 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 11 


defective children are subject as a result of skin 
eruptions, colic, disturbances of sleep and func- 
tional anomalies. Czerny, who called attention 
to the relationship between intestinal disturb- 
ances of children and neuroses, emphasizes es- 
pecially the importance of psychotherapy in chil- 
dren who became neurotic in the course of consti- 
tutional diseases. Only recently Hamburger has 
thrown light upon the nature of the ambitions in 
neurotic children, while Stransky showed the re- 
lation between myopathy and psychic manifesta- 
tions. 

These brief references give us an insight into 
the attempts of the present day scientific trends 
to emphasize and maintain the relation between 
psychic anomalies in childhood and constitutional 
inferiority. The first comprehensive funda- 
mental views concerning this relation were pub- 
lished by me in the “Studie,” wherein I showed 
how the inferior organ constantly endeavors to 
make a very special demand upon the interest and 
attention. I was able to prove in this and other 
contributions to what extent inferiority of an 
organ constantly shows its influence on the psyche 
in action, in thought, in dreams, in the choice of a 
vocation and in artistic inclinations and capabil- 
ities.’ 

1See also Adler, “The Theory of Organ-inferiority and Its 
Significance for Philosophy and Psychology.” Address in the 


12 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The existence of an inferior organ demands a 
kind of training on the part of the appertaining 
nerve tracts and on the part of the psychic super- 
structure which would render the latter active in 
a compensatory manner when a possibility for 
compensation exists. In such an event, however, 
we must likewise find a reénforcement in the psy- 
chic superstructure of certain allied points of con- 
tact which the inferior organ has with the outside 
world. 

To the originally inferior organ of vision cor- 
responds a reénforced visual psyche; a defective 
digestive apparatus will be accompanied by a 
greater psychic capability in all nutritional direc- 
tions, as gourmondism, acquisitiveness, and where 
it concerns money equivalents, stinginess and 
greed, will be manifested to an extraordinary de- 
gree. 

The ability of the compensating nervous sys- 
tem will manifest itself through qualified reflexes 
(Adler) and conditioned reflexes (Bickel) by 
means of sensitive reactions and exaggerated sen- 
sitiveness. The compensating psychic super- 
structure will bring about an accentuated mani- 
festation of the psychic phenomena of presenti- 
ments and forethoughts and their effective fac- 
tors such as memory, intuition, introspection, 


Philosophic Society of the Vienna University, 1908, and J. 
Reich, “Art and the Eye,” Oesterreichische Rundschau, 1908. 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 13 


analysis, attention, hypersensitiveness, in brief, 
of all the fortifying psychic forces. To these re- 
assuring forces belong also the fixation and 
accentuation of those traits which form useful 
guiding principles in the chaos of life, thus dimin- 
ishing the feeling of uncertainty. 

The neurotic individual is derived from this 
sphere of uncertainty and in his childhood is 
under the pressure of his constitutional inferior- 
ity. In most cases this may be easily detected. 
In other cases the patient behaves as if he were 
inferior. In all cases, however, his striving and 
thinking are built upon the foundation of the 
feeling of inferiority. This feeling must always 
be understood in a relative sense, as the outgrowth 
of the individual’s relation to his environment or 
to his strivings. He has constantly been draw- 
ing comparisons between himself and others, at 
first with his father, as the strongest in the family, 
sometimes with his mother, his brothers and sis- 
ters, later with every person with whom he comes 
into contact. Upon closer analysis, one finds 
that every child, especially the one less favored by 
nature, has made a careful estimate of his own 
value. The constitutionally inferior child, the 
unattractive child, the child too strictly reared, 
the pampered child, all of whom we may align as 
being predisposed to the development of a neuro- 
sis, seek more diligently than does the normal child 


14 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


to avoid the evils of their existence. They soon 
long to banish into a distant future the fate which 
confronts them. In order to bring this about, 
he, the defective child, requires an expedient 
which enables him to keep before his eyes a fixed 
picture in the vicissitudes of life and the uncer- 
tainty of his existence. He turns to the con- 
struction of this expedient. He sums up in his 
self-estimation all evils, considers himself incom- 
petent, inferior, degraded, insecure. And in 
order to find a guiding principle he takes as a 
second fixed point his father or mother who en- 
dowed him with all the attributes of life. 

And in adjusting this guiding principle to his 
thinking and acting, in his endeavors to raise him- 
self to the level of his (all-powerful) father, even 
to the point of surpassing the latter, he has quite 
removed himself with one mighty bound from 
reality and is suspended in the meshes of a fic- 
tion. 

Similar observations may also be made in a 
lesser degree among normal children. ‘They too 
desire to be great, to be strong, to rule as the 
father, and are guided by this objective. Their 
conduct, their psychical and physical attitude is 
constantly directed towards this goal, so that one 
may almost detect a true imitation, an identical 
psychic gesture. 

Example becomes the guide to the “masculine” 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 15 


goal, so long as the masculinity is not doubted. 
Should the idea of “the masculine goal” become 
unacceptable to girls, then there takes place a 
change of form of this “masculine” guiding prin- 
ciple. One can scarcely evaluate this phenome- 
non in a more correct way than by assuming that 
the necessary denial of the gratification of certain 
organic functions forces the child from the first 
hour of his extrauterine life into assuming a com- 
bative attitude towards his environment. From 
this result tensions and accentuations of certain 
organically acquired abilities—c’est la guerre!— 
as I have described them in my “Studie” and the 
“Aggressionstrieb.” ? 

In the temporary denials and discomforts 
which the first years of childhood bring with 
them, one must seek the impulse for the develop- 
ment of a host of common traits of character. 
Above all the child learns, in his weakness and 
helplessness, in his anxiety and manifold short- 
comings to value an expedient which assures him 
of the help and support of his relatives and guar- 
antees their concern. In his negativistic be- 
havior, in his obstinacy and refractoriness, he 
often finds a gratification of his consciousness of 
his own powers, thus ridding himself of the pain- 
ful realization of his inferiority. Both main- 


2 Adler, “Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und in der Neurose,” 
Lc. 


16 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


springs of the child’s behavior, obstinacy and 
obedience (Adler, “Trotz and Gehorsam”) guar- 
antee to him an accentuation of his feeling of ego- 
consciousness and assist him in groping his way 
towards the masculine goal or, as we wished to 
adduce before, towards the equivalent of this. 
The awakening self-eonsciousness is always being 
suppressed in constitutionally inferior children, 
their self-esteem is lowered because their capacity 
for gratification is much more limited. 

Let us consider the numerous restrictions, the 
courses of treatment and the sufferings of chil- 
dren ill with gastro-intestinal derangements; the 
effeminacy and fastidiousness seen in the anemic, 
weakly children suffering from respiratory dis- 
orders; the itching and tortures of those afflicted 
with prurigo and other exanthemata; the many 
degrading defects of childhood; the fear of con- 
tamination on the part of the parents of such chil- 
dren which often leads, as do the frequent difficul- 
ties in their bringing up—in their school progress 
as well as the stubbornness of these children—to 
an isolation and misunderstanding on the part of 
their comrades and within the family circle. In 
the same manner the self-consciousness is injured 
by rachitic clumsiness, congenital obesity and the 
lesser grades of mental backwardness. The child 
usually explains his difficulty by the assumption 
of a neglect, a slight by the parents, especially as 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 17 


it occurs in later children or in the youngest, occa- 
sionally even in the first born. This hostile ag- 
gression, reénforced and accentuated in constitu- 
tionally inferior children, becomes confluent with 
his effort to become as great and strong as the 
strongest and thrusts forward activities which lie 
at the bottom of the infantile ambition. All later 
trains of thought and activities of the neurotic 
are constructed similarly with his childhood wish 
phantasy. The “recurrence of the identical” 
(Nietzsche) is nowhere so well illustrated as in 
the neurotic. His feeling of inferiority in the 
presence of men and things, his uncertainty in the 
world force him to an accentuation of his guiding 
principles. To these he clings throughout life in 
order to orient himself in existence by means of 
his beliefs and superstitions, in order to overcome 
his feeling of inferiority, in order to rescue his 
sense of ego-consciousness, in order to possess a 
subterfuge to avoid a much-dreaded degradation. 
Never has he succeeded so well in this as during 
his childhood. His guiding fiction which makes 
him behave as if he surpassed all others may 
therefore also bring about a form of conduct iden- 
tical with that of the child. 

In such manner then the infantile gratifica- 
tions become criteria and thus strengthen the 
guiding principle. It would be amiss to assume 
that only the neurotic exhibits such “guiding prin- 


18 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ciples.” The healthy individual would also have 
to do without orientation in the world if he did 
not arrange the cosmic picture and his expe- 
rience according to some imaginary fiction. In 
hours of uncertainty these fictions come to the 
fore more distinctly and become the imperative 
influences dominating beliefs, ideals and free will; 
moreover they also act secretly in the unconscious 
like all other psychic mechanisms whose verbal 
image they represent in conscious thought. Log- 
ically considered they are to be regarded as ab- 
stractions, as simplifications, which have for their 
object the solution of life’s difficulties in a manner 
analogous to that required for the simplest expe- 
riences. The original type of these simplest ex- 
periences, the meshwork of apperceptive memory, 
we found in studying the child’s efforts to solve 
his difficulties. In dreams this form of appercep- 
tion is still more obvious; we shall consider this 
subject later. 

The neurotic carries his feeling of inferiority 
constantly with him. Hence his method of think- 
ing by analogy is more strongly and clearly de- 
veloped. 

His “misoneism” (Lombroso), his fear of the 
new, of decisions and tests, which is usually 
present, originates from the lack of analogy for 
these new conditions. He has chained himself 
so strongly to guiding principles, taken them 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 19 


so literally and sought to realize them only, that 
unconsciously he has become incapable of pro- 
ceeding freely and without prejudice to the solu- 
tion of real problems. Even the necessary limi- 
tations imposed by reality, where matters clash 
for want of room, do not impel him to reject his 
fiction because he is forced to suspend it, but 
only to alter it. Still more consequentially the 
psychotic patient strives to bring about a realiza- 
tion of his fiction. The neurotic in real life 
flounders in his self-created guiding principle and 
thus arrives at a splitting of the personality in 
seeking to do justice to both the real and the 
imaginary requirements. The form and content 
of the neurotic “guiding principle’ originate 
from the impressions of the child who feels him- 
self neglected. These impressions, which of 
necessity develop out of an original sense of in- 
feriority, call forth an aggressive attitude in life, 
the object of which is the overcoming of the un- 
certainty. In this attitude of aggression all 
those efforts of the child which tend toward an 
elevation of his feeling of ego-consciousness find 
their place, successful efforts which prompt a 
repetition, unsuccessful ones which serve as me- 
mentoes for those goal-preparing tendencies de- 
veloped out of a conspicuous organic disease and 
which express themselves in a mass of psychic 
predispositions, as well as those observed in 


20 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


others. All the phenomena of the neuroses orig- 
inate from these predisposing means which tend 
toward the attainment of the final object, mascu- 
linity. They are mental predispositions always. 
ready to initiate the straggle for ego-conscious- 
ness, they obey the command of the guiding prin- 
ciple which seeks to realize itself through the 
channels of reactions lying ready at hand in child- 
hood. In the developed neuroses the fiction 
stimulates all these predispositions whereupon 
they comport themselves as independent final 
purposes. Anxiety, which formerly sought to 
furnish assurance against being alone, against 
underestimation, against the feeling of insignifi- 
cance, is hypostasized; the compulsion, originally 
in the sense of the fiction to preserve a manly be- 
havior, becomes independent; in fainting, in 
paralysis, in the hysterical pains and functional 
disturbances, the pseudo-masochistic method of 
the patient is symbolically represented, in which 
he seeks to attract attention or to avoid a decision 
which is feared. ‘The important role played by 
the neurotic uncertainty, as I have recognized 
and described it, leads to that sort of strengthen- 
ing of the predisposition and its consequences 
which makes the originally unimportant phenom- 
ena of a functional nature assume the most aston- 
ishing exaggeration as soon as the inner exigency 
demands it. 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 21 


The gaze of the neurotic, on account of this 
feeling of uncertainty, is directed far into the 
future. All present existence is to him only a 
preparation. Moreover this circumstance is 
largely responsible for encouraging his dreaming 
proclivities and estranging him from the world 
of reality. As with religious persons his king- 
dom is not of this world and like them he cannot 
free himself from his self-created deity, the exal- 
tation of his ego-consciousness. A host of gen- 
eral traits of character of necessity develop in an 
individual thus turned away from reality. First 
of all must be mentioned the deep reverence in 
which are held the expedients which subserve the 
fiction. An individual of this type will as a rule 
manifest a carefully adjusted mode of behavior, 
exactness and pedantry, first of all, in order not 
to increase the great difficulties of life and sec- 
ondly and principally, in order to distinguish him- 
self from others in dress, in work, in morals, and 
thus acquire for himself a feeling of superiority. 
This exaggerated trait of character usually serves 
also to bring him face to face with the enemy, 
to furnish the opportunity for a maturing of such 
situations as will bring him into conflict with his 
environment so that he finds occasion for giving 
vent to reproaches. At the same time these con- 
stant reproaches serve to keep alive his feeling, 
his attention, to the fact that people are neglect- 


22 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ing him, that they are not taking him into ac- 
count. This trait may be found even in the child- 
hood of certain neurotics where it serves the pur- 
pose of putting some one at their service, say the 
mother, who must take care of their clothes every 
evening for a considerable length of time in a 
definitely prescribed manner. In a similarly re- 
markable manner, anxiety and timidity gain ex- 
pression and I must adhere to the opinion, in spite 
of all other attempts at explanation, that the psy- 
chic phenomena of anxiety originate from an hal- 
lucinatory excitation of a predisposition which in 
childhood developed automatically from small 
beginnings as soon as a bodily injury was threat- 
ened, and which in later life, especially in the 
neuroses, is conditioned by the final goal, namely, 
to escape a lowering of ego-consciousness and to 
make oneself of service to others. It is easy to 
understand how all wish-phantasies may attain 
an enormous degree, just as attainment seldom 
brings with it satisfaction. One may assume 
without fear of contradiction that a neurotic 
“wishes to have everything.” This desire coin- 
cides with his “guiding fiction” to become potent. 
If he draws back in horror before undertakings 
which promise advantage, as he usually does be- 
fore crimes and immoral acts, it is because he en- 
tertains fears for the safety of his ego-conscious- 
ness. For this reason he recoils in horror from 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 23 


lying, but in order to proceed with certainty and 
in order to preserve steadfastness he may harbor 
the thought that he is capable of great evils and 
crimes. That this obstinate pursuit of the fiction 
implies a social injury is obvious. 

The egoism of neurotics, their envy, their 
greed, frequently unconscious, their tendency to 
undervalue men and things, originate in their 
feeling of uncertainty and serve the purpose of 
assuring them, of guiding them and of spurring 
them on. As they are enveloped in phantasy 
and live in the future their preoccupation is not 
to be wondered at. The variability of temper 
depends on the play of the phantasy which at one 
time awakens painful memories, at another fills 
with the enthusiasm of an expected triumph, 
analogous to the vacillations and doubts of the 
neurotic. In the same way special traits of char- 
acter which are not foreign to the normal psyche 
appear to be directed by the hypnotizing goal and 
strengthened in this direction. Sexual precocity 
and falling in love are forms of expression for 
the heightened tendency to captivate. Mastur- 
bation, impotence and perverse excitements lie in 
the direction of the guiding line of fear of a part- 
ner and fear of separation, along with which 
sadism represents the desire to play the “wild 
man” in order to overcome the feeling of inferior- 
ity. As the driving force and goal of the neurosis 


24 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


developing out of a constitutional inferiority, we 
have up to this point regarded the accentuation 
of ego-consciousness which constantly strives for 
expression with especial force. In doing so we 
have not ignored the fact that this is only a mode 
of expression of a striving and yearning whose 
beginnings are deeply rooted in human nature. 
The form of expression itself and the accentua- 
tion of this guiding thought, which may also be 
expressed by Nietzsche’s “will to power,” teaches 
us that there is an especial compensatory force at 
play, whose object it is to put an end to the inner 
uncertainty. By means of an unyielding for- 
mula, which usually presses to the surface of con- 
sciousness, the neurotic seeks to obtain the ful- 
crum whereby to lift the world off of its hinges. 
It matters but little how.much of this driving 
force becomes consciously known to the neurotic. 
The mechanism itself he never understands, 
neither is he able to explain and break down un- 
aided his mode of apperception by means of anal- 
ogy and the conduct resulting therefrom. This 
can only succeed by means of an analytic process 
which permits us to divine and understand his 
infantile analogy by means of abstraction, reduc- 
tion and simplification. In this way one finds 
regularly apparent that the neurotic always ap- 
perceives after the analogy of a contrast, indeed, 
that usually he only recognizes and gives value 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 25 


to relations of contrast. This primitive mode of 
orientation in life which corresponds to the an- 
tithesis as set forth in the categories of Aristotle 
and to opposites in the Pythagorean table orig- 
inates also in the feeling of uncertainty and illus- 
trates a simple device of logic. What I have 
described as polar, hermaphroditic opposites, 
Lombroso as bipolar, Bleuler as ambivalent, leads 
to this same method of apperception which works 
according to the principal of opposites. One 
should not fall into the common error of regard- 
ing this as an essence of things, but must recog- 
nize in it the primitive method of procedure which 
measures a thing, a force, or an event, by an op- 
posite which is fitted to it. 

The further the analysis proceeds the more dis- 
tinct appears one of these opposites, the original 
form of which we have established as the feeling 
of inferiority and the maximation of the ego-con- 
sciousness. This only agrees with the primitive 
efforts of the child to orient himself in the world 
and to obtain certainty when tangible antitheses 
are encountered. Among these I have regularly 
found the following: (1). Above—beneath, (2). 
Masculine—feminine. One furthermore always 
finds an arrangement of memories, feelings and 
actions according to this type of antitheses in the 
sense the patient takes them (not always in the 
generally accepted sense), i.e., inferior—beneath, 


26 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


feminine; powerful—above, masculine. This 
grouping is important for it renders possible, be- 
cause it can be conserved or falsified at will, the 
distortion of the cosmic picture, whereby the neu- 
rotic can always hold fast to his standpoint, 
namely, that of a neglected person, by rearrange- 
ment, by accentuation or by arbitrary changes. 
It lies in the nature of things that in this process 
his constitutional inferiority comes to his assist- 
ance as well as his constantly increasing aggres- 
sive environment which is continually set into 
activity by the neurotic conduct of the patient. 

At times the neurotic is not fully conscious of 
his supposed or real defeat. It is then always 
found that it is his pride which prevents him 
from recognizing it. Nevertheless he acts as if 
he had appreciated the new degradation and the 
riddle of a nervous attack is often only solved 
when this fact is understood. The revelation of 
such repressed feelings is not of much therapeutic 
value, at least, it can only be of value when by 
means of it the connection with the infantile 
mechanism which is responsible for the predis- 
position to the attack becomes apparent to the 
patient. At times there results even a seeming 
relapse which may be explained by the fact that 
the patient directs his predispositions against the 
physician because the latter has injured his feel- 
ings of personal worth. 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 27 


There still remains to be answered one im- 
portant question. On what does the patient 
base his feeling of inferiority? . Inasmuch as the 
patient is only able to detect the possibility of re- 
lationship between disease predispositions and 
those organ-inferiorities which force themselves 
upon his attention he is constantly in the path of 
conjecture. He will for example not seek the 
reason for his inferiorities in the disturbances of 
the secretions of the glands, but will blame in a 
general way his weakness, his stunted growth, 
his sham education, the small size or anomalies of 
his genitals, lack of complete virility, his effemi- 
nacy, the feminine traits of a physical or psychic 
nature, his parents, his heredity; at times only 
lack of love, bad training, deprivation in child- 
hood, ete. And what about his neurosis, the neu- 
rosis in the sense we understand it? We shall find 
that the accentuation of his predispositions on an 
analogic, childish basis, that his symbolized 
thoughts, his preparations for feelings, and re- 
sults used by him as means of expression will 
spring into action as soon as the patient fears or 
experiences a set-back. Being from a certain 
situation, so to speak, inoculated with the feelings 
of inferiority, he exhibits an anaphylactic reac- 
tion against depreciation of his ego-conscious- 
ness and finds in irresolution, in vacillation, in 
doubt and in skepticism, as well as in the break- 


28 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ing out of a neurosis or a psychosis, a refuge and 
security against the greatest evil that could be- 
fall him, namely, the conjuring up of a distinct 
realization of his inferiority. In line with this 
the typical causes of the onset of a neurosis and 
psychosis are easy to divine and to prove: 

1. The desire for knowledge of sex differences, 
the uncertainty concerning his own sexual röle, 
may be looked upon as causes of the arousing of 
the feeling of inferiority. Likewise the realiza- 
tion and grouping of traits believed to be fem- 
inine, the vacillating, doubting, hermaphrodistic 
apperception and hermaphrodistic predisposi- 
tion. Predisposition to and psychic gestures of 
the feminine role always entail greater passivity, 
anxious anticipation, etc., but call forth the mas- 
culine protest, stronger emotivity. (Heymanns) 

2. Onset of menstruation. 

. Epoch of menstrual activity. 

. Epoch of sexual activity. 

. The stage of fitness for marriage. 

. Pregnancy. 

. Puerperium. 

. Climacteric, reduction of potency. 

. Examinations, choice of profession. 
. Danger of death. 

All these epochs call forth heightening of or 
changes in the preparatory attitude toward life. 
The bond common to them all which holds them 


COON HD OS Ww 


foun 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 29 


together is the expectation of new events which 
imply for the neurotic new struggles, new dan- 
gers of a set-back. He proceeds therefore im- 
mediately to intensive protective measures, the 
most extreme of which is suicide. Outbreaks of 
neuroses and psychoses represent accentuations 
of his neurotic preparedness, predispositions in 
which are always found prominent traits of char- 
acter, calculated to guarantee this sort of secur- 
ity, such as exaggeration of hypersensitiveness, 
greater carefulness, irritability, pedantry, ob- 
stinacy, stinginess, discontent, impatience, and 
many others. As these traits are easily demon- 
strable, they are especially suitable for deter- 
mining the existence of a psychogenic disorder. 

We arrived at the conclusion in the foregoing 
that it is the feeling of uncertainty which forces 
the neurotic to a stronger attachment to fictions, 
guiding principles, ideals, dogmas. ‘These guid- 
ing principles float before the normal person also. 
But to him they are a figure of speech, a device 
for distinguishing above from below, left from 
right, right from wrong, and he is not so involved 
in prejudice that when called upon to make a de- 
cision he cannot free himself from the abstract 
and reckon with reality. Just as little do the 
phenomena of life resolve themselves for him into 
strict antitheses, but on the contrary he is striv- 
ing constantly to keep his thoughts and actions 


30 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


detached from this unreal principle and to bring 
them into harmony with reality. That he uses 
artifices at all as a means to an end arises from 
the usefulness of the fiction in casting up the ac- 
counts of life. ‘The neurotic, however, like the 
child devoid of contact with life and like the prim- 
itive understanding of early man catches at the 
straw of his fiction, hypostasizes it, arbitrarily 
ascribes to it a real value and seeks to realize it in 
the world. For this the fiction is unfitted, still 
more unfitted when, as in the psychoses, it is ele- 
vated to a dogma or anthropomorphosed. The 
symbol as a “modus dicendi” dominates our 
speech and thought. The neurotic takes it liter- 
ally and in the psychosis the realization is at- 
tempted. In my contributions to the theory of 
the neuroses this point is constantly emphasized 
and maintained. A fortunate circumstance 
made me acquainted with Vaihinger’s ingenious 
“Philosophy of the ‘As If’” (Berlin, 1911), a 
work in which I found the trains of thought sug- 
gested to me by the neurosis set forth as valid for 
general scientific thought. 

After we have established that the fictitious 
guiding goal of the neurotic consists of an un- 
limited heightening of the ego-consciousness 
which deteriorates into the “will to seem” (Nie- 
tzsche) we may proceed to a consideration of the 
abstract conception of these problems of life. In- 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 31 


asmuch as in seeking the sex differentiation the 
role of the male is given a decided preference, the 
formal changes agreeing with the antithesis, man- 
woman, begin at an early period and for the neu- 
rotic arises the formula “ I must act as though I 
were a complete man (or would become one).” 
The feeling of inferiority and its consequences 
become identified with the feeling of effeminacy, 
the compensatory pressure in the psychic super- 
structure impels toward obtaining a guarantee 
that the manly role will be preserved and the 
meaning of the neurosis assumes the form of the 
antithetical, fundamental thought, “I am a 
woman and will be a man.” 

_ This guiding final purpose supplies the psy- 
chic gestures and predispositions necessary for 
this thought, but is expressed likewise in the atti- 
tudes of the body and in mimicry. And with 
these prepared gestures, of which the neurotic 
traits of character are to be considered a herald- 
ing, the neurotic confronts persons and life, 
anxiously and with strained attention asking if 
he will prove himself aman. Sham combats play 
a great röle; they are begun so that the neurotic 
may exercise himself, that he may gain experi- 
ence from other or similar conditions, so that he 
may become more cautious, and in order to ob- 
tain proof from example that he dare not venture 
upon the main battle. How much in this he re- 


32 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


arranges, exaggerates, depreciates, which is pos- 
sible to him from a certain arbitrariness (Meyer- 
hoff), how he falsely classifies and how he seeks 
to put his fiction on firm foundation, demand a 
separate consideration, such as I have tentatively 
furnished in the preliminary work for this book. 
That in this mascuhne protest, however, there 
lies for the neurotic the more fundamentally com- 
pensating “will to power” which may change the 
value of feelings and even transform pleasure 
into pain is proved by the frequent cases where 
the direct effort to act like a man meets with ob- 
stacles and avails itself of a circuitous route, in 
which event the role of the woman is overvalued, 
passive traits are strengthened, masochistic, and 
in men, passive homosexual traits emerge, by 
means of which the patient hopes to gain power 
over men and women: in short, the masculine 
protest makes use of the feminine role in order to 
attain its purpose. 

That this device is likewise dictated by the 
“will to power” is proved by the further neurotic 
traits which strive for mastery and superiority in 
the most extreme form. This apperception, 
however, brings the sexual jargon into the neuro- 
sis which must be regarded as symbolic and re- 
quires interpretation. 

Side by side with or dominating it is found in 
neurotics the method of apperception which ar- 


THE FEELING OF INFERIORITY 33 


ranges perception according to the spatial antith- 
esis, above-beneath. Also, for this primitive 
attempt at orientation, which the neurotic empha- 
sizes very strongly, one finds analogies in primi- 
tive people. However, while it is easy to under- 
stand that the masculine principle is identified 
with perfection, we are forced to guesses in re- 
gard to the valuation of “above” as the equal of 
the principle. A certain probability seems to 
give color to the opinion that the value and sig- 
nificance of the upper part of the body in com- 
parison with the feet furnishes the explanation. 
Still more important it seems to me that the val- 
uation of the word above and its covaluation with 
perfection originates in the longing of man to 
lift himself, to fly, to do that which is impossible 
for man. The universal flying dreams and. the 
efforts of man in the same direction seem to con- 
firm this opinion. That in the congressus sex- 
ualis the “above” is confluent with the masculine 
principle does not seem without significance. 

The reénforcement of the fiction in the neuro- 
sis causes a concentration of the attention on 
those points of view regarded by the neurotic as 
important. Therefrom results the narrowing of 
the field of vision and the psychic preparation as 
motor and psychic predispositions. Simultane- 
ously, the more accentuated neurotic character 
comes into force, which maintains the assurance 


34 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


of the fiction, comes in touch with inimical forces 
and, spreading itself out far over the boundaries 
of personality, into the realms of space and time, 
furnishes, in the form of a secondary guiding 
line, an impetus to the will to power. ‘The neu- 
rotic attack, finally, like the strife for power, has 
for its purpose the protection of the ego-con- 
sciousness from degradation. 

Therefore from constitutional ee there 
arises a feeling of inferiority which demands a 
compensation in the sense of a maximation of the 
ego-consciousness. From this circumstance the 
fiction which serves as a final purpose acquires an 
astonishing influence and draws all the psychic 
forces in its direction. Itself an outgrowth of 
the striving for security, it organizes psychic pre- 
paratory measures for the purpose of guarantee- 
ing security, among which the neurotic character 
as well as the functional neurosis are noticeable 
as prominent devices. 

The guiding fiction has a simple, infantile 
scheme, and influences the apperception and the 
mechanism of memory. 


CHAPTER II 


PSYCHIC COMPENSATION AND ITS SYNTHESIS 


Our examination of the facts has led us to 
understand how out of the absolute inferiority of 
the child (especially the one constitutionally bur- 
dened), there is evolved a kind of self estimation 
which calls forth a feeling of inferiority. 

Analogously to the 8s zoi o7é the child seeks to 
gain a standpoint which will enable him to get 
a perspective in the problems of life. From this 
point of departure, which is taken as a fixed pole 
in the flux of phenomena, the child psyche pro- 
jects its thoughts towards the goal which it longs 
to reach. ‘These thoughts, too, are apprehended 
as fixed points by the abstract conceptions of hu- 
man understanding and are then concretely inter- 
preted. The aim to be great, to be strong, to be 
a man, to be “above” is symbolized in the person 
of the father, the mother, the teacher, the coach- 
man, the locomotive engineer, etc., and the con- 
duct, the attitude, the imitative gestures, the play 
of children and their wishes, the day dreams and 
favorite stories, ideas about their future vocation 


show us that the compensatory tendency is at 
35 


36 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


work and is making preparations for the future 
role. The feeling which the individual has of his 
own inferiority, incompetency, the realization of 
his smallness, of his weakness, of his uncertainty, 
thus becomes an appropriate working basis 
which, because of the intrinsically associated feel- 
ings of pleasure and pain, furnishes the inner im- 
pulse to advance towards an imaginary goal. 
The scheme of which the child avails himself in 
order to enable him to act and orient himself is 
one common to and in accordance with the tend- 
ency of the human understanding to reduce that 
which is chaotic, fluid and intangible in life to 
measurable entities by means of the assumption 
of fictions. We proceed in the same way when 
we divide the globe by means of meridianal and 
parallel lines, for thus only do we preserve fixed 
points which we can place in relation with each 
other. In all similar attempts (and the human 
psyche is full of them) it is the question of an in- 
troduction of an unreal and abstract scheme into 
actual life, and I consider the presentation of this 
conception as I have gathered it from the psycho- 
logical observation of neuroses and psychoses and 
which, according to the proofs furnished by 
Vaihinger, manifests itself in all scientific con- 
cepts, to be the main object of this book. No 
matter from what angle we observe the psychic 
development of a normal or neurotic person he 


PSYCHIC COMPENSATION 37 


is always found ensnared in the meshes of his 
particular fiction; a fiction from which the neu- 
rotic is unable to find his way back to reality and 
in which he believes while the normal person 
utilizes it for the purpose of reaching a definite 
goal. However, that which gives such irresisti- 
ble impulse to the utilization of this scheme is al- 
ways the uncertainty in childhood, the great dis- 
tance which separates the child from the potency 
of man, from the distinctions and privileges of 
manhood, forebodings and knowledge of which 
the child possesses. And in regard to this point 
I beg leave to supplement these statements of the 
learned writer, Vaihinger, namely, that the thing 
which impels us all and especially the neurotic 
and the child to abandon the direct path of in- 
duction and deduction and to use such devices as 
the schematic fiction originates in the feeling of 
uncertainty and is the craving for security, the 
final purpose of which is to escape from the feel- 
ing of inferiority in order to ascend to the full 
height of the ego-consciousness, to complete man- 
liness, to attain the ideal of being “above.” ‘The 
greater the distance to this ideal, the more dis- 
tinctly the guiding fiction asserts itself so that 
the feeling of being “under” may be just as much 
a determining factor as the deification of the 
father and mother who are the ideals of strength. 

We thus see exertions put forth far beyond 


38 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


those which we would expect in the most violent 
bodily performances which might arise from in- 
stincts, or in the strongest desire for gratification 
of organic longings. Goethe among others also 
refers to this fact that while perception is con- 
nected with the practical satisfaction of necessi- 
ties, yet man carries on a life beyond this in feel- 
ing and imagination. In this thought the com- 
pulsion to the elevation of the ego-consciousness 
is aptly expressed, as well as in a passage oc- 
curring in one of Goethe’s letters to Lavater in 
which he says, “This longing to elevate as high 
as possible the apex of the pyramid of my exist- 
ence, the base of which is placed in my possession, 
outweighs all else and is scarcely a moment ab- 
sent from thought.” 

It can readily be understood how such a tense 
psychic situation—and every artist, every genius, 
fights the same battle against the feeling of un- 
certainty; with him, however, it is the valuable 
cultural medium of his art—which is capable of 
reénforcing and bringing to light a host of traits 
of character which help to construct the neuroses. 
Thus, first of all, ambition. ‘This is the strongest 
of the secondary guiding principles which strive 
towards the imaginary goal. And it generates 
a number of psychic predispositions whose pur- 
pose it is to secure to the neurotic superiority in 
all situations of life, but which on the other hand 


PSYCHIC COMPENSATION 39 


makes his aggressiveness, his affectivity, appear 
to be in a state of constant irritation. Thus the 
neurotic individual seems always to be proud, 
dogmatic, envious and miserly, seeks always to 
make an impression, wishes to be first, but always 
trembles for the result and gladly postpones de- 
cisions. Hence the hesitating, cautious behavior 
of neurotics, their mistrust, vacillation and doubt. 
As if for practice in the sense of a preliminary 
process he carries on these psychic preparations 
in small things in order to attain to fixed points 
and safeguarding directing principles for greater 
aims which hold him under their charm. This is 
also the meaning of Freud’s displacement 
mechanism, i.e., the patient is impelled by his 
craving for security to collect proof experi- 
mentally, in corpore vili, which justifies and will 
continue to justify his entire psychic attitude. 
As a rule the result is always the thought, “I must 
be cautious, if I wish to attain my goal.” And 
not infrequently the patient commits audaciously 
reckless acts in order to assure himself through 
an emphasis of the lesson of his recklessness the 
attainment of his main point, namely, the mas- 
culine ideal. Often hallucinations and dreams 
assume with neurotics and psychotics the function 
of these warning voices and depict how it has al- 
ready been once before, how it has been with 
others, or how the thing might turn out, in order 


40 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


to hold the patient to the guiding principle in 
which he finds security. 

At other times the strongly emphasized traits 
of eagerness for strife, obstinacy and activity, 
which are to “elevate” the apex of the pyramid 
as far as possible are strongly accentuated by 
pedantry which strives to keep them from chang- 
ing their direction. That the eagerness for 
knowledge, as a mighty promoter towards attain- 
ing the high goal, is greatly overstrained, is not 
astonishing. With equal distinctness impa- 
tience, fear of being too late, fear of attaining 
nothing, manifest themselves as a particularly 
strong impulse to neglect no means, to do rather 
too much than not enough towards the attain- 
ment of the goal. ‘These traits always lie within 
the field of the developed neurosis, where the 
feeling of “craving for security” obtrudes itself 
more and drives to the dangerous expedients by 
means of which the feeling of inferiority is ren- 
dered more profound, and the patient acts as if 
he were restrained, cut off from success and with- 
out hope, or he plunges to a greater or less degree 
into passivity, displays effeminate traits, con- 
ducts himself in a masochistic or perverse manner 
and finally greatly reduces his sphere of activity 
so that it is more shaken and more strongly dom- 
inated by the symptoms of the disease. In a 
similar manner arises the arrangement of indo- 


PSYCHIC COMPENSATION 41 


lence, laziness, fatigue, impotence of every sort 
which furnish a pretext to escape from decisions 
which could affect the pride of the neurotic, an 
excuse for withdrawing from study, from a voca- 
tion, from marriage. At times this develop- 
mental phase terminates in suicide which is then 
always felt as a successful revenge on fate or on 
his relatives. 

Consciousness of guilt also asserts itself. 
Here we find one of the most difficult points in 
the analysis of neuroses and psychoses. Con- 
sciousness of guilt and conscience are fictitious 
guiding principles of caution, like religiosity and 
subserve the craving for security." Their object 
is to prevent a lowering of the ego-consciousness 
when the irritated aggressiveness impels immod- 
erately to selfish deeds. In the consciousness of 
guilt the glance is directed backwards, conscience 
operates through foresight. The love of truth, 
too, is sustained by the craving for security and 
belongs really within the sphere of our personal 
ideal, while the neurotic le represents a feeble 
attempt to preserve appearances and to effect 
compensation. 

All these attempts towards elevation, efforts 
of the “will to power,” must naturally be under- 
stood as a form of the striving towards masculin- 


1See Fortmuller, “Psychoanalysis and Ethics,” München, E. 
Reinhardt, 1912. 


42 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ity and become identified with the masculine pro- 
test, because this represents a fundamental form 
of the psychical impulse to become of value, in 
accordance with which all experiences, percep- 
tions and directions of will are grouped. Apper- 
ception is guided in accordance with this most 
significant scheme, namely, the goal, especially in 
neurotics, is the erection of the masculine protest 
against an effeminate self-estimation. ‘Thus are 
guided also attention, foresight, doubt, as well as 
all traits of character and other psychic and phys- 
ical inclinations, but in the highest degree and 
above all the evaluation of all experiences in line 
with this masculine goal, so that all these phe- 
nomena contain a dynamic which is betrayed to 
the experienced, and which tends from that which 
is below to that which is above, from that which 
is feminine to that which is masculine. The crea- 
tion of all these lines of force, the fixation of this 
remote goal, the emphasis and occasional protec- 
tion of inferior effeminate traits for the purpose 
of combating them more forcibly by the mascu- 
line protest takes place by means of the same fac- 
tor which also created the organic compensation, 
i.e., the tendency towards adjustment by con- 
stant attempt to supplant an injurious, inferior 
performance by an increase of effort and which in 
the psychic sphere finds expression in the craving 
for security which takes as a guiding line (direc- 


PSYCHIC COMPENSATION 43 


trix) the will to power, to be manly, in order to 
escape the feeling of uncertainty. 

The greatest difficulty which stands in the way 
of an understanding of the neurosis arises from 
the striking protection afforded these inferior, 
effeminate traits and their acknowledgment by 
the patients. Here belong all the phenomena of 
the disease generally, but also the passive, maso- 
chistie traits, the effeminate characteristics, the 
passive homosexuality, impotence, suggestibility, 
accessibility to and inclination for hypnosis, or, 
finally, the apparent surrender to effeminacy and 
to effeminate behavior. The final object, how- 
ever, always remains the same, the domination 
over others which is felt and appreciated as a 
masculine triumph. Neither are the above de- 
scribed compensatory features ever absent in the 
makeup of these patients, as they might be ex- 
pected to be in individuals who assume as a 
ground for action a feeling of inadequacy and 
who then strive to secure by every possible means 
a substitute for their shortcomings, to supply that 
which they feel to be lacking in their exaggerated 
ego-consciousness. And also in the psychic situ- 
ation the sexual element as a symbol asserts itself, 
inasmuch as such patients frequently form their 
apperceptions in accordance with a scheme in 
which their genital organs are regarded as if they 
were effeminized, restricted, castrated, and as if 


44 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION, 


they were therefore constantly forced to seek a 
substitute. One form of this substitution they 
find in the depreciation and emasculation of all 
other persons. From this tendency to deprive 
others of worth originates the considerable reén- 
forcement of certain traits of character, which set 
forth further inclinations and which have the 
quality of injuring others, as sadism, hate, con- 
tentiousness, intolerance, envy, etc. Active ho- 
mosexuality, also, as well as perversions which de- 
grade the partner, also Lustmord, arise from the 
neurotic tendency to depreciate, a tendency which 
can hardly be pictured too strongly. They all 
represent a rationalization of the symbolism of 
subjection in line with the concept which asserts 
the “sexual dominance of the male.” In short, 
the neurotic may also elevate the feeling of his 
own worth by degrading others. 

We have mentioned above the protection of 
the effeminate traits in the neurosis for the pur- 
pose of better carrying on the combat, for the 
purpose of a better surveillance over self. These 
accentuations along with the distinct tendency to 
give preference to the will to masculinity create 
the appearance of a rent in the psyche of the neu- 
rotic which is familiar to writers as double per- 
sonality, dissociation, and which is frequently 
seen in the changing humors of neurotics, but also 


PSYCHIC COMPENSATION 45 


in the succession of depression and mania, of 
ideas of persecution and grandeur in the psy- 
choses. I have always found as an internal con- 
necting bond in these antithetical conditions 
the tendency to maximate the ego-consciousness, 
whereby the “inferior” situation is associated 
with a degradation, but is circumscribed and ar- 
ranged as a ground for operation. It is then 
that the masculine protest asserts itself, which is 
often carried to the length of asserting a resem- 
blance to God or an intimate connection with 
Him. For the “splitting of consciousness” the 
severely schematic and very abstract process of 
apperception is also responsible, a form of apper- 
ception which groups the internal and external 
experiences according to a scheme which has the 
form of an absolute antithesis, something like the 
debits and credits in book-keeping, where there 
are no transitions possible. This fault of the 
neurotic mode of thinking, which is identical with 
a too far-fetched abstraction, is likewise caused 
by his craving for security, a tendency which re- 
quires for the purpose of making decisions, for 
anticipations and actions, sharply defined guiding 
lines, idols, false deities in which the neurotic be- 
lieves. In this way he becomes estranged from 
concrete reality. For to find one’s bearings in 
the world of reality an elasticity of the psyche 


46 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


and not a rigidity is required, a utilization of ab- 
straction, but not an adoration, an idolizing of 
the same as the final purpose of existence. 
Accordingly we shall find in the mental life of 
the neurotic, just as is the case in primitive 
poetry, in mythology, in legends, in cosmogony, 
in theogony and in the beginnings of philosophy 
a most pronounced tendency to give a symbolic 
style to himself, his experiences and to persons 
about him. Thus naturally the phenomena 
which do not belong together must be sharply 
separated from each other by an abstracting fic- 
tion. ‘The impulse to this expedient arises from 
the longing for an orientation and has its roots 
in the neurotic’s craving for security. This im- 
pulse is often so intense that it demands the split- 
ting of unity, of the category, of the unity of the 
ego into two or more of its antithetical parts. 
From the above described self-estimation of 
the child, who is induced by inferiority of consti- 
tution and the evils arising therefrom to strive 
after special securities, up to the complete devel- 
opment of the neurotic technique of thinking and 
its coadjuvant lines, of the neurotic character, 
a host of psychic phenomena make their appear- 
ance which according to Karl Groos ? may be re- 
garded as a training, according to our interpreta- 


2See Karl Groos, “Die Spiele der Menschen, Die Spiele der 
Thiere.” 


PSYCHIC COMPENSATION 47 


tion as a preparation for the imaginary goal. 
They are manifested at an early age, are indicated 
even in early infancy and are constantly at the 
foundation of the influences of conscious and un- 
conscious education. ‘The whole development of 
the child shows that it proceeds in the direction of 
an idea, which naturally takes a primitive form 
and quite regularly seeks concrete embodiment in 
the form of a person. Under this compulsion, 
the psychic mechanism of which is for the most 
part unconscious and only partly conscious, the 
psyche in the process of formation comes to more 
distinct expression, and the mental as well as the 
physical life of a human being taken at any given 
point of its development is to be understood as 
the answer which that individual gives to the 
question of life. 

This answer, in reality the manner in which 
life is accepted, is according to all the knowledge 
thereof furnished by experience, to be considered 
as identical with the effort to put an end to un- 
certainty, to the chaos which prevails in impres- 
sions and feelings, with the effort to obtain a firm 
hold in order to overcome the difficulties of life. 
Reflection, observation, thought and forethought, 
attention, calculation and valuation are all efforts 
put forth by this craving for security. And in- 
asmuch as the realization of one’s own inferiority 
is taken as an abstract standard for inequality 


48 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


among human beings, the greater, the stronger 
and his measure are taken for the fictitious goal 
so that it may be a guarantee against this uncer- 
tainty and fright. Thus it is that the soul of the 
child constructs a guiding line which impels to- 
wards an elevation of the ego-consciousness in 
order to escape from uncertainty, the influence of 
which is still stronger in neurotics who have felt 
their inferiority more keenly. Mythographers, 
the human race, poets, philosophers, founders of 
religions have taken the material from their con- 
temporaneous periods for the transformation of 
the guiding lines so that immortality, virtue, 
piety, riches, knowledge, social consciousness of 
the upper classes or self-perfection were available 
as goals and were utilized according to the recep- 
tive peculiarities of the individual who longed for 
perfection. At this point the living energies of 
the child become transferred into the self-created 
sphere of his subjective world which henceforth 
as a guiding fiction transmutes, falsifies and 
changes the values of all feelings and emotions, 
pleasures and pains, even the struggle for self- 
preservation, for his benefit, in order to attain the 
goal; a transformation which utilizes all the ex- 
periences of the neurotic in such a way as to bring 
about preparations which will ensure the triumph. 

These preparatory acts with their tendency to 
change values may be most clearly observed in 


PSYCHIC COMPENSATION 49 


the play of nervous children, in their delibera- 
tions over the choice of a future vocation and 
their physical and psychical attitudes. These 
phenomena will be further discussed in connec- 
tion with the dominating craving for security 
which controls them. Concerning the nervous 
habitus it may be stated that as a rule it is notice- 
able at an early age, that it takes the form of a 
pantomimic representation of some trait of char- 
acter, either as an anxious, waiting, distrustful, 
uncertain, cautious, bashful attitude or as a hos- 
tile, obstinate, self-certain, self-complacent, for- 
ward attitude. Blushing is noticeable or the 
glance is peculiarly fixed, cast down or hostile. 
It is easy to correlate one of these attitudes or 
gestures, or a mimic trait, with the prototype. In 
nervous children imitation of the male principle, 
the father, is often found; the mother only be- 
comes a model for imitation after a formal change 
in the guiding principle has taken place, or when 
from the beginning the moral superiority of the 
mother is beyond question. Usually these phe- 
nomena are insignificant and such as are not as 
a rule subjected to the observation of the phy- 
sician. Crossing the legs, the arms, a peculiar 
manner of gait, preference for certain foods, bor- 
rowing of certain traits of character, etc., or in 
the presence of more strongly emphasized ob- 
stinacy opposite forms of expression. The re- 


50 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


tained bad habits of childhood, such as eneuresis, 
biting the nails, sucking, stuttering, winking the 
eyes, masturbation, ete., can always be traced to 
these beginnings of obstinacy. They are the ex- 
pedients of the weak to diminish the pathos of 
the distance and thereby do away with the feel- 
ing of inferiority, and strive in the last analysis to 
a transformation of authority and at the same 
time to gain an excuse for avoiding a decision, 
for postponing it. 

All considerable phenomena of this sort are 
themselves neurotic traits of character or show 
that they are permeated by the neurotic charac- 
ter and like it itself are a form of expression of 
the craving for security, preparatory processes 
and preliminary provisions of the compensatory 
force which is produced by the feeling of inferi- 
ority. 


CHAPTER III 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION AS THE GUIDING IDEA 
IN THE NEUROSIS 


THE most important task of thinking is to an- 
ticipate actions or events; to seize upon an objec- 
tive and ways and means and to influence them 
as far as possible. By means of this process of 
forethought, our influence over space and time 
is assured to a certain degree. Accordingly our 
psyche is first of all an organ of aggression born 
out of the distress of the all too restricted limi- 
tation which from the first renders difficult the 
gratification of natural appetites. This organ- 
ically determined goal of gratification of appe- 
tites will only endure so long as the suitable means 
are at hand for its stabilization; for rendering it 
secure against the strongest attacks. Toward 
the end of the nursing period, when the child ac- 
quires ability to carry out independent, purpose- 
ful actions which are not merely directed toward 
the gratification of appetite, when he takes his 
place in the family and begins to adapt himself 
to his environment, he already possesses abilities, 


psychic gestures and preparations. Besides this 
51 


52 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


his conduct has acquired a certain uniformity and 
is seen to be on the road toward acquiring his 
place in the world. Such a uniformity of con- 
duct can only be comprehended by the assump- 
tion that the child has discovered some specific 
fixed point outside of his own personality towards 
which he strives with his developmental energies. 
The child must, therefore, have constructed for 
himself a guiding principle, a guiding model, ob- 
viously in the hope of thus orienting himself 
in the best possible manner in his environment and 
of obtaining gratification of his necessities of 
avoiding pain and of obtaining pleasure.‘ From 
this guiding ideal arises the very beginning of the 
child’s craving for tenderness, that quality which 
(Paulsen) originally determines the tractability 
of the child. Soon there become associated with 
this first quality, efforts to gain the praise, help 
and love of the parents, stirrings of independ- 
ence, of obstinacy and of opposition. The child 
has found a meaning in life towards which he 
strives and whose still indistinct outlines he is 
forming, and starting from which he derives that 
quality of prevision which is calculated to direct 
and give worth to his actions and impulses. It is 
the child’s helplessness, clumsiness and uncer- 
tainty which necessitates the establishment of the 
tentative tests of possibility, the acquisition of 
1 Adler, “Trotz und Gehorsamkeit.” 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 53 


experience, the creation of memories for the pur- 
pose of constructing a bridge leading to that fu- 
ture where there are to-be found greatness, power 
and satisfaction of all sorts. The construction of 
this bridge is the most important work the child is 
called upon to perform because without it he 
would find himself in the midst of the inpouring 
impressions without order, without counsel, with- 
out guide. It is scarcely possible to define the 
limits of this first stadium, of this awakening sub- 
jective world, to describe it in words. But it 
may, however, be said that the guiding model of 
the child must be so constructed as if it were able 
to bring to the child greater certainty and orien- 
tation by influencing the direction of his will. 
But he can only obtain security by striving to- 
wards a fixed point where he sees himself greater 
and stronger, where he finds himself rid of the 
helplessness of infancy. The symbolic and logi- 
cal nature of our process of thinking permits the 
construction of this future changed personality 
in the image of the father, the mother, of an elder 
brother or sister, or teacher or some professional 
man, or hero, or animal, or God. The qualities 
of greatness, power, knowledge and ability are 
features common to all these guiding images and 
thus they are one and all symbols for imaginative 
abstractions. And thus like idols made of clay 
they receive from the imagination of man, force 


54 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


and life and react upon the psyche which has cre- 
ated them. 

This artifice of thinking would have the stamp 
of paranoia and of dementia precox conditions, 
which create for themselves hostile forces for the 
purpose of securing ego-consciousness, were not 
the child able at all-times to free himself from the 
bonds of his fiction, to eliminate his projections 
(Kant) from his calculations, and to make use 
only of the impetus which is given him by this 
guiding line. His uncertainty is sufficient to 
make him set up a fantastic goal for the purpose 
of orientation in the world, but it is not so great 
as to make him deprive reality of its value and to 
assert dogmatically the reality of this guiding 
model, as is the case in the psychoses. One must, 
however, call attention to the similarity, the sig- 
nificance of this uncertainty and the device of a 
fiction in normal persons, neurotics and the in- 
sane. 

The part of this process which is common to all 
humanity, normal and abnormal, is that the ap- 
perceiving memory is under the sway of the guid- 
ing fiction. It is because of this that there exists 
within certain limits in all mankind a uniformity 
concerning a cosmic conception. ‘The child in its 
insignificance and helplessness will constantly 
strive to enlarge his field of power and will mark 
this field off after the pattern of that which seems 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 55 


to possess the greatest strength. And now it 
becomes evident in the course of psychic develop- 
ment that that which was at first only an imagi- 
nary expedient, important only in its relations, 
only a means for gaining ground to stand upon, 
for finding one’s bearings, for gaining a foothold, 
has become a goal in itself, obviously because the 
child can only in this way obtain self-assurance 
in acting and not directly through the gratifica- 
tion of desires.? 

Thus the effective point is found outside the 
corporeal sphere according to which the psyche 
adjusts itself, a point which forms the center of 
gravity of human thought, feeling and volition. 
And the mechanism of apperceiving memory 
with its host of experiences, transforms itself 
from an objectively operating system into a sub- 
jectively active, fictitiously modified scheme of 
an imagined future personality. It becomes the 
task of this scheme to bring about such connec- 
tions with the outside world as will serve to maxi- 
mate his feeling of ego-consciousness, such asso- 
ciations as will hint at the preparing activities 
and thought indicators and bring these in contact 
with the already existing state of preparedness. 
One is here reminded of the apt expression of 


2As may be seen from Karl Groos’ “Play of Animals” the 
understanding of the animal psyche is likewise based upon the fact 
that we see it act as though it were following the direction of a 
fictitious guiding line. 


56 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Charcot who has emphasized for science that “one 
only discovers that which one knows,” an obser- 
vation which when directed to practical experi- 
ence tends to show that our whole sphere of per- 
ception is limited by a number of predetermined 
psychical mechanisms and predispositions as 
Kant’s theory ° of “a priori” forms of perception 
teaches us. In a similar manner our actions are 
determined by the content of experiences, which 
are given birth to and are determined by the guid- 
ing fiction. Even our judgments concerning the 
value of things are determined according to the 
standard of the imaginary goal, not according to 
“real” feelings or pleasurable sensations. 

And conduct follows as James expresses it in 
consequence of a sort of approbation—depends 
as it were on a fiat, command or acquiescence. 
The guiding fiction is therefore first of all the 
expedient, the device by means of which the child 
seeks to free himself from his feeling of infe- 
riority. It initiates compensation and stands at 
the service of the craving for security. The 
greater the feeling of inferiority, the more im- 
perative and stronger will be the necessity for a 
steadying, guiding principle and indeed the more 
distinctly it manifests itself, and like compensa- 

3] have to call attention here to Bergson’s fundamental teach- 


ings, without being able to give room here for his important view- 
points. 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION: 57 


tion in the organic sphere, the effectiveness of 
_ psychic compensation is linked with a functional 
increase and brings about novel and many-sided 
manifestations in the mental life. One of the 
forms of expression of this compensatory mech- 
anism, intended to assure the sense of ego-con- 
sciousness is exemplified by the neurosis and 
psychosis. 

The constitutionally inferior child with his host 
of disadvantages and uncertainties will construct 
his goal in a more definite and clearer manner, 
will outline more distinctly the guiding principle 
and will adhere to it more anxiously or dogmati- 
cally. In fact the principal impression which one 
gains from the observation of a neurotically dis- 
posed child is usually that the child is guided in 
the choice of a weapon by his somatic inferiority 
which he utilizes in his dealings with his relatives 
or which he emphasizes in his obstinacy. 

Often his illness is borrowed from his environ- 
ment either by simulation or exaggeration of ac- 
tual ailments, all this in order to strengthen his 
position. Should such means not have the de- 
sired effect upon his environment, the child en- 
deavors to rid himself of his complaints through 
the exercise of superior efforts, as result of which 
there develop not infrequently qualified and artis- 
tic performances in the event of the experiencing 
of an over-compensation on the part of the 


58 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


functional anomalies of the eye, ear, speech or 
musculature. Associated with this are also stir- 
rings of independence. Or the remedy is sought, 
on the other hand, in a greater dependence, for 
the attainment of which, anxiety, a feeling of in- 
significance, weakness, awkwardness, incapacity, 
sense of guilt and remorse serve as strongholds. 
The same tendency may be seen in the adherence 
to the bad habits of childhood, in the retention of 
a psychic infantilism in so far as this is not ex- 
clusively or partially the result of obstinacy, of 
the infantile negativism. 

A number of the complaints of psychopathic 
children are of a subjective nature, and corre- 
spond to a complete or partial error of judgment 
as it takes place in the effort of children to find a 
reason for their feeling of inferiority and to com- 
prehend it. Frequently these logical interpreta- 
tions are already intermixed with the compensat- 
ing ambition or with the child’s aggressiveness 
towards its parents. “The fault lies with my 
parents, with my lot, because I’m the youngest, 
because I was born too late, because I am a Cin- 
derella, because I’m perhaps not the child of these 
parents, of this father, of this mother, because I 
am too small, too weak, have too small a head, am 
too homely, because I have an impediment of 
speech, a defect of hearing, am cross-eyed, near- 
sighted, because I have imperfect genitals, be- 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 59 


cause I’m not manly, because I am a girl, because 
I’m bad by nature, dull and awkward, because I 
have masturbated, because I’m too sensuous, too 
covetous and naturally perverted, because I sub- 
mit easily, am too dependent and obey, because I 
cry easily, am easily affected, because I am a 
criminal, a thief, an incendiary, and could murder 
some one. My ancestry, my education, circum- 
cision are to blame, because I have too long a nose, 
too much hair, too little hair, because I am a 
cripple.” Thus and similarly sound the child’s 
attempts to unburden himself by blaming fate 
just as in the Greek fate tragedies, these are at- 
tempts to preserve the ego-consciousness and hold 
others responsible for his inferiority. ‘These at- 
tempts are regularly met with in the psychic 
treatment of the neuroses and they can always be 
referred back to the relationship between an ex- 
isting feeling of inferiority and an assumed ideal. 
The significance and value of these thought 
processes which are as a thorn in the side of the 
neurotic are noted also in the uses to which they 
are put by himself, first for the stimulation of his 
efforts in the direction of his ideal (grandiose 
ideas) and second, the utilization of them as a 
refuge and excuse when forced to a decision which 
threatens a lowering of the ego-consciousness 
(depreciatory ideas). ‘The second applicability 
and application naturally occupies the fore- 


60 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ground in the neuroses because the goal toward 
which the neurotic strives is set too high to be 
reached in a direct line. The utilization of this 
ideal is only rendered possible by an admixture 
of aggression or in blaming fate as well as hered- 
ity. By means of this the neurotic gains a per- 
manent base of operation on the strength of which 
he unfolds, thrusts forward and stabilizes certain 
traits of character which serve the same hostile 
purpose, such as obstinacy, a dominating, grum- 
bling nature, pedantry, because thereby he al- 
ways succeeds in gaining mastery over his en- 
vironment principally by calling attention to his 
terrible suffering. All of these traits and predis- 
positions associated with bad habits retained from 
childhood which have become markedly exagger- 
ated, as well as with disease symptoms of a self- 
created and self-modeled nature stand in the 
closest interrelation, are inseparable one from an- 
other and show their dependence on a factor out- 
side their own sphere, 1. e., they depend upon the 
guiding fiction which has evolved from the crav- 
ing for security or from the longing for the 
maximation of the ego-consciousness. In the 
imaginary basis of this feeling of inferiority which 
because of the craving for security is always 
thought of in an exaggerated manner and felt too 
keenly, I see the chief therapeutic hope. The 
question whether the feeling of uncertainty is 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 61 


conscious or unconscious is of secondary impor- 
tance. At times pride carries things so far that 
“memory gives way” (Nietzsche). Naturally 
the above described connection is not realized by 
the patient. It is for this reason that he remains 
the plaything of his emotions and affects until 
such time as the mechanism becomes revealed to 
him and set to rights, until such time as the pre- 
dispositions and neurotic plan of life are shat- 
tered; a plaything of emotions and affects the in- 
teraction of which becomes further complicated 
because of a constant admixture of traits of char- 
acter intended to negate his sense of inferiority, 
such as pride, envy, greed, cruelty, courage, re- 
vengefulness, irritability, etc., traits of character 
which are constantly being excited through his 
craving for security. 

The tendency to exaggerate and emphasize 
existing defects plays an important role in the 
psychology of the neuroses. An appearance of 
weakness, suffering, incapacity and uselessness 
results from this manner of presenting actual de- 
fects because the neurotic is compelled by the 
mechanism which controls him to conduct himself 
unwaveringly in such a manner as to feel as 
though he were sick, as though he were effeminate, 
inferior, neglected, injured, sexually over-ex- 
cited, impotent or perverted. The cautious ap- 
proach to problems of life which constantly ac- 


62 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


companies these impulses, the exaggerated striv- 
ing upwards, the desire to play the role of man in 
some way or other, to be superior to everybody 
else, the neurotic’s stronghold with its prime ob- 
ject of avoiding decisions and setbacks and thus 
to escape a lowering of his ego-consciousness, all 
of this reveals to us the true state of affairs, 
namely, that the low self-estimation of the neu- 
rotic is in itself an expedient by means of which 
he strives the more powerfully to attain that 
guiding goal which will bring about a maxima- 
tion of his ego-consciousness. He may conduct 
himself according to the motto “half and half,” 
he may cede certain strongholds in the contest 
but he does so solely in order to fortify himself 
against an ultimate feeling of inferiority and in 
order to be the better able to utilize others in his 
service. 

The sexual feature of the psychology of the 
neuroses which Freud looks upon as a cardinal 
point is in this wise explained as the effect of a 
fiction. ‘There is no objective standard of the 
“libido.” The exaltation and diminution of the 
same is always in accord with the imaginary goal. 
It is easy for the neurotic to convince himself that 
he is the subject of a high sexual tension by means 
of a more or less purposeful arrangement, and 
especially by means of a concentration of the at- 
tention in this direction the moment he begins to 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 63 


seek proof of how much injury sexuality works 
to his feeling of security and how much his ego- 
consciousness is threatened from this source. 
The weakening of libidinous impulses even to the 
point of psychic impotence is to be regarded as 
purposeful checks on aggression, as disorders of 
natural predispositions, as a construction of an 
“as if” for the purpose of assuring himself against 
marriage, against a swerving from the goal, 
against a degradation at the hands of the sexual 
partner, against poverty or culpability. Re- 
pressed or conscious perverse tendencies, as well 
as the compulsion to masturbation are always 
looked upon as detours, as symbols of an imagin- 
ary plan of life whose purpose is self-assurance. 
They are called into being by the guiding fiction 
as soon as the feeling of inferiority finds expres- 
sion in the fear of the sexual partner as happens 
regularly where there exist sexual anomalies. ‘The 
fiction may then also repress the incentive to per- 
version into the subconscious or make the fear of 
the partner unrecognizable to consciousness so 
that it only becomes apparent from a survey of 
the whole situation. It resorts to the first alter- 
native when it depends on pride for the fulfillment 
of its purpose, to the latter when it makes a virtue 
of the defect and seeks the degradation of the 
partner. Incestuous tendencies too, to which 
Freud ascribes such an important role in the pro- 


64 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


duction of neuroses and psychoses reveal them- 
selves in the psychology of the neuroses as pur- 
poseful edifices and symbols, which derive their 
usually harmless material out of childhood Iıfe 
| with its preparatory processes. A proper insight 
for instance into the “CEdipus complex” shows 
us that it is nothing more nor less than a figura- 
tive, sexually clothed conception of what consti- 
tutes masculine self-consciousness, superiority 
over woman, but at the same time betrays the 
cause which leads to this phenomenon, namely as 
if the mother were the only one that one could sub- 
jugate, on whom one could depend or as though 
sexual desire (already in childhood) were to be 
carried through in spite of everything and always 
by a struggle with stronger forces (the father, 
dragons, danger of death). As may be inferred 
from this interpretation, close inquiry into the 
sexual neuroses always leads to the discovery of a 
guiding fiction which reveals itself in a sexual 
form or can be revealed by therapeutists, as well 
as to the laying bare of a mode of apperception 
evolved according to a sexual scheme in conse- 
quence of which the neurotic and often also the 
normal person attempt to apprehend and under- 
stand the world and all its phenomena in sexual 
terms, in a sexual picture asit were. Our further 
investigations reveal that this sexual scheme 
which is often carried out in speech, in custom, 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 65 


and manners, is only a variation of that all-em- 
bracing scheme of more fundamental origin, Le., 
the antithetical mode of apperception as “male- 
female” “up-down.”’* ‘The later psychic per- 
verse tendencies derive their material and impulse 
from the harmless bodily sensations and misjudg- 
ments of childhood which when occasion arises are 
given an extraordinarily high value or some 
chance pleasurable sensations are perceived as 
analogues of sexual sensations. The psycholo- 
gist must not assume the same point of view, must 
not maintain such a mode of apperception as 
valid, not substitute real sexual components for a 
fiction as the patient does. His task on the con- 
trary consists in revealing to the patient the su- 
perficiality of his attempts at orientation, to tear 
it apart as mere product of the imagination, and 
to weaken the feeling of inferiority which drives 
the patient in a convulsive manner towards these 
guiding principles which would necessitate the 
carrying out of the “masculine protest” in a cir- 
cuitous manner. 

Apperceiving memory which influences our 


4See the dream of Hippias, Herodotus VI, 107; “he dreamt 
that he was sleeping with his mother.” This he dreamed as he 
was about to conquer his maternal city, as he had already done 
once before as the companion of his father. Thus the CEdipus 
complex as the symbol of the desire to dominate. With the Ro- 
mans too Beischlaf (sexual congress) symbolized conquest, vic- 
tory. Compare the double meaning of the word “subigere.” 


66 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


cosmic picture to such a great extent works also 
with a fiction as it were, with a schematic fiction, 
in accordance with which we choose and model our 
perceptions, our experiences, as well as the train- 
ing of all our connate tendencies and capacities 
until they are changed into the appropriate psy- 
chical and technical skillfulness and preparedness. 
The modus operandi of our conscious and uncon- 
scious memory and its individualization obey the 
personal ideal and its standards. From this we 
are able to deduce that as a guiding fiction its pur- 
pose is to confront the problems of life so soon as 
the feeling of inferiority and uncertainty impels 
toward compensation. ‘This fixed guiding point 
of our efforts, which in no sense possesses reality, 
is absolutely decisive for the psychic development, 
for it enables us to make steps in the chaos of the 
world, as does the child when learning to walk and 
keeping in his eye a goal which he strives to reach. 
Far more unwaveringly, the neurotic keeps be- 
fore his eye his God, his idol, his ideal of person- 
ality and clings to his guiding principle, losing 
sight in the meanwhile of reality, whereas the nor- 
mal person is always ready to dispense with this 
crutch, this aid, and reckon unhampered with 
reality. In this instance, the neurotic resembles 
a person who looks up to God, commends himself 
to the Lord and then and there awaits credulously 
for his guidance; he is nailed to the cross of his 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 67 


fiction. ‘The normal individual too may and does 
create his deity, feels drawn upward but never 
loses sight of reality, and always takes it into ac- 
count as soon as he is called upon to act. Ac- 
cordingly the neurotic lives under the hypnotic in- 
fluence of an imaginary plan of life. 

That this imaginary mark of the personal ideal 
situated as it is beyond space and time is never 
without effect, may be seen from the trends of the 
attention; interests and tendencies of these indi- 
viduals, which always lead to points of view of an 
a priori nature. The exquisite purposefulness 
of our psychic processes and the predisposition 
determined thereby is responsible for the fact 
that our actions have definite beginnings and ter- 
minations, that, as Ziehen emphasizes, voluntary 
and involuntary actions are constantly aimed at 
attaining a definite result, that we must assume 
with Pawlow a decided intelligence in the func- 
tioning of the organs. All these phenomena are 
so convincing that philosophers and psychologists 
have from the earliest times taken as a teleologic 
dogma everything which premeditatively at- 
tempted an orientation according to an assumed 
fixed point as the goal. 

The concept of natural selection is entirely too 
inadequate to explain results which are able to 
take on new and changing forms as occasion de- 
mands. Experience compels us to consider all 


68 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


these phenomena as dependent upon an uncon- 
sciously active fiction, the faint conscious irradia- 
tions of which furnish us goals, according to 
which in the last analysis our apperception of all 
our experiences and activities is shaped. It is 
less difficult to prove the details of this guiding 
fiction, than the fiction itself, than the fictitious 
goal itself. Psychological research has called at- 
tention to various such goals. For our purpose 
it will suffice to consider critically just two of 
these. Most authorities content themselves with 
the view that all human activity, all volition is 
dominated by feelings of pleasure and pain. 
Upon superficial consideration these authors seem 
to be correct in their assumptions, because as a 
matter of fact the human psyche does tend to seek 
pleasure and avoid pain. But the foundation of 
this theory is unstable. There is no standard for 
feelings of pleasure, indeed no standard for feel- 
ing at all. ‘There exists furthermore no percep- 
tion, no action, the effect of which may not vary 
in accordance with place and time, under some 
circumstances causing pleasure; under others 
pain. And even the primitive sensations result- 
ing from satisfaction of organic desires have their 
gradations and vary with the degree of satiability 
and in accordance with cultural guiding princi- 
ples, so that for satisfaction in itself to serve as 
the goal, it requires extreme denial, and ab- 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 69 


stinence. Now granting that satisfaction has ac- 
tually been attained, does the psyche really lose 
its directing principle? The psyche’s iron neces- 
sity for orientation and security requires for their 
establishment and their functions a more stable 
standpoint than the vacillating and uncertain 
principle of gratification of desire, and a more 
stable point of view than the object of attaining 
gratification. The impossibility of orienting 
one’s self and one’s actions according to such a 
goal forces even the child to abandon efforts in 
this direction. Finally it is a misuse of an ab- 
straction to single out and emphasize by means 
of a petitio principii, out of the various complex 
psychic activities, the quest of pleasure, as the 
motive force, after every isolated impulse has al- 
ready been explained—as pleasure seeking, as 
libidinous. Shiller with a keenness of vision 
trained in the school of Kant saw much further 
when he made a place in the coming “philosophy” 
for the directing influence of earthly events, and 
even went so far as to consider it (philosophy) 
dependent on “hunger and love.” 

To ascribe, however, the whole directing force 
to sexuality as Freud does, or what is for him the 
same thing, to the libido, to ascribe this whole in- 
fluence to nothing but love is a violation of logical 
thinking itself, a fiction of a bad sort, which when 
accepted as a dogma must lead to great contra- 


70 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


dictions and confusion of concepts because it con- 
trasts altogether too much with reality. 

The disapproval of the principle of “self- 
preservation” is more difficult, especially as that 
principle is supported on the one hand by argu- 
ments of a teleological significance, on the other 
hand by the import of Darwin’s theory of natural 
selection. But we see constantly that we under- 
take courses of action contrary to the principles 
of self-preservation or to the preservation of the 
species, yes, that a certain arbitrariness (Fres- 
Meyerhof) permits us, in regard to self-preserva- 
tion as well as in regard to pleasure, to raise or 
lower our valuations, that we often wholly lose 
sight of self-preservation when pleasure or pain 
enter into the question, and that on the other hand 
we often sacrifice pleasure when an injury is 
threatened to the ego. In what manner do these 
two incentives which are certainly not without in- 
fluence, range themselves under the main guiding 
principle which impels to the elevation of the ego- 
consciousness? ‘The two points of view corre- 
spond to two types of individuals (to which it is 
possible to add still others) one of which is least 
able to dispense with pleasure in his ego-con- 
sciousness, while the other places first importance 
on the feeling of life, on the feeling of immortal- 
ity. Therefore, there arise modified modes of 
perception which produce antitheses in thought 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 71 


in the sense of “pleasure—pain” or “life—death.” 
The former are unable to deprive pleasure of 
value, the latter life. In the sense of procreation 
which is again thought of in the manner of the 
antithetical scheme “male-female,” these two 
types approach each other and seek expression 
in the direction of the masculine protest. As far 
as neurotics are concerned the one type has al- 
ways sought to compensate the painful feeling of 
his somatic inferiority, the other type has grown 
up in the fear of death, of dying early. Their 
view of the world furnishes them only fragments, 
their soul is partially color-blind, but notwith- 
standing this often more keen-sighted than the 
Daltonists in their understanding of color. 

We close this critical observation with a refer- 
ence to the absolute principle of the “will to 
power” a guiding fiction which sets in more for- 
cibly and earlier, and is precipitated and matured, 
in proportion to the prominence assumed by the 
consciousness of inferiority in the physically in- 
ferior child. The ideal of personal importance 
as a point toward which all efforts are directed is 
created by the craving for security and contains 
as imaginary qualities all the powers and natural 
gifts of which the child believes himself deprived. 
This fiction, more exaggerated than under normal 
conditions, molds the mentality, the traits of 
character and predispositions in its own image. 


72 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The neurotic apperception proceeds according to 
a figurative scheme containing sharply opposed 
antitheses, and the grouping of the impressions 
and emotions takes place according to corre- 
spondingly false and imaginary values. 

It lies in the nature of the neurotic fiction, of 
the exaggerated idea of personal worth, to reveal 
itself under two forms, sometimes as an “abstract 
mechanism” sometimes as a concrete picture, or 
as a phantasy, as an idea. In the first case the 
connection of what is symbolic in the representa- 
tion with the compensated feeling of inferiority 
should not be lost sight of, and in the second case 
one must above all take into consideration the 
decisive share in the process taken by the psychic 
dynamic which impels “upwards.”° In the 
analysis of a psychogenic disease so long as the 
guiding tendency “upwards” does not reveal it- 
self, the nature of the disease remains hidden to 
us, for no matter how valuable the insights of the 
psycho-therapeutists have been, so long as the 
secondary guiding principle of attaining pleasure, 
of affectivity (Bleuler) and those which originate 
as result of physical inferiority (Adler) are not 
referred back to the ideal of personality—our un- 
derstanding remains imperfect, “there is still un- 
fortunately lacking the psychic bond.” It is also 


5 Of the later authors who have especially emphasized this point 
of view, I must especially mention H. Silberer. 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 73 


not astonishing that in different cases different 
characteristics are given to this ideal of person- 
ality and usually various characteristics at one 
and the same time as these are derived from 
various sorts of organ defects, usually from 
several at the same time. A _ preliminary, de- 
cidedly incomplete diagram which would corre- 
spond more to the “abstract psyche” of the neu- 
rotic than to that of the normal individual would 
be the following: 


Ego-Weal asthe goal 





eeling a e 
: HE 


In this outline the most varied combinations must 
be imagined, if it is to serve its purpose as a model 
for the purpose of superficial orientation. In- 
stead of discussing these combinations and the 
multitudinous components we will discuss some 
distinguishing phenomena which seem important 
for the understanding of the neuroses and the 
neurotic character. 


74 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Each of the abstract guiding lines of the neuro- 
sis and of its underlying psychic mechanism may 
become accessible to consciousness by means of a 
memory-picture or may be rendered accessible to 
it. This picture may originate from the rem- 
nants of a childhood experience, or it is a product 
of phantasy, a species of the craving for security. 
It may represent a symbol, a trade-mark as it 
were, for a certain mode of reaction, now and 
then reaching development or being reformed 
only at a later period often when the neurosis is 
already fully developed. Being obviously the 
effect of a sort of economy of thought, which is 
furnished by the principle of least resistance 
(Avenarius), it is never of consequence as far as 
its content is concerned, but only as an abstract 
scheme or as the remnant of a psychic experience 
in which the will to power once filled its destiny. 
This schematic fiction, no matter how concretely 
it may manifest itself, is never to be understood 
otherwise than in an allegorical sense. In it is 
reflected an actual constituent part of experience 
together with a “moral” both of which are re- 
tained by memory in the interest of the self-assur- 
ance that is aimed at, either as a memento, to 
adhere more tenaciously to the guiding principle 
or as a fore-judgment not to abandon it. None 
of these memory pictures has ever had patho- 
genic significance, like a psychic trauma for in- 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 75 


stance, and it is only when the neurosis super- 
venes, when the feeling of degradation of the ego- 
consciousness leads to the masculine protest and 
because of this to a closer attachment to the al- 
ready long established compensatory guiding 
principles are these memory pictures hunted out 
from material belonging to a remote past and 
come to light because of their usefulness, partly 
in order to make possible the neurotic’s conduct 
and partly to give it meaning. Here belong 
above all pain, anxiety and affect predispositions 
which are based upon such reminiscences which 
may become actualized in an hallucinatory man- 
ner, and which may be likened to visual and audi- 
tory hallucinations. Naturally those reminis- 
cences will be typical which stand in the closest 
possible relation to the guiding principle because 
they represent or simulate for the neurotic, cling- 
ing as he does to the guiding principle, both the 
greater and smaller detours of which he has 
to avail himself in order to elevate his ego-con- 
sciousness. ‘The characteristic of the neurotic 
psyche is only its tenacious adherence to the guid- 
ing principle. It is the contradictions with real- 
ity, the conflicts which arise from them and the 
urgency to acquire social importance and power, 
which bring forth the symptoms. This is even 
more obvious in such psychoses where the guiding 
principle appears most subtly. Misinterpreta- 


76 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


tions of reality are undertaken, and demonstra- 
tions result, merely, so to speak, for the sake of 
proof. In both instances, the patient behaves as 
though he had the goal constantly before his eyes. 
In the case of the neurosis he exaggerates and 
combats the real obstacles to the maximation of 
his ego-consciousness or seeks to avoid them by 
_ the construction of excuses. The psychotic indi- 
vidual clinging as he does to his idea (fixe idée) 
seeks to ignore reality or to transform it in such 
a way as to make it correspond with his unreal 
standpoint. Freud, who has done so much to- 
ward the discovery of symbolism in the neurosis 
and psychosis, has called attention to the galaxy 
of symbols. Unfortunately he has carried his 
investigations only to the point of discovering 
the actual or possible sexual formule in these 
symbols, and has not pursued their further eluci- 
dation into the dynamic eventuality of the mas- 
culine protest, of striving “upward.” Thus it 
happened that for him the meaning of the neuro- 
sis became exhausted in the conversion of libidi- 
nous stimuli whereas, in reality that which lies 
behind the symbolism is the appearance of or the 
actual impulsion toward a maximation of the 
masculine ego-consciousness. 

We have described the guiding ideal of the ego 
as a fiction, thus denying its reality, but we must 
nevertheless assert that although unreal it is of 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 77 


the greatest importance for the process of life, 
and for the psychic development. Vaihinger in 
his “Philosophy of As If” has given a brilliant 
elucidation of this apparent contradiction, and 
recognized the fiction as an opposition to reality 
but as indispensable for the development of 
science. Reference to this singular relationship 
in the psychology of the neuroses was first made 
by me and I was considerably assisted and con- 
firmed in my view by Vaihinger’s work. I am 
thus in a position to say something concerning 
the fiction of ego-consciousness, and to throw 
some light on its significance as well as on its 
mode of appearance in the psyche. It is first 
of all an abstraction and must in itself be re- 
garded as the indication of an anticipation. It 
is, so to speak, the marshall’s staff ° in the wallet of 
the insignificant soldier, and may be looked upon 
as “payment on account” demanded by the prim- 
itive feeling of uncertainty. ‘The construction 
of the fiction takes place by setting aside disquiet- 
ing inferiorities and burdensome realities in the 
idea, as always happens when the psyche seeks 


6 For the benefit of psychologists of a keener insight, I note 
here that the prevalence of examples which have been taken from 
military life have been chosen by me with an especial object in 
view. In military training the starting point and fictive purpose 
are brought into closer relation, can be more readily noted, and 
every movement of the training soldier becomes a dexterity 
which has for its purpose the transformation of a primary feel- 
ing of weakness into a feeling of superiority. 


78 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


certainty and escape from its restraint. The 
painful uncertainty is reduced to its lowest possi- 
ble, albeit apparently causal amount, and this is 
transformed into its very antithesis which is in 
turn made into the fictive goal of every wish- 
phantasy and desire. It is then that this goal 
may be made concrete for the sake of becoming 
self-evident. For instance, the restriction of 
food in childhood is felt as an abstract “nothing,” 
as want, in contrast to this feeling the child comes 
to long for “all,” for superfluity until it brings 
this goal much nearer to the understanding in the 
person of the father, in the form of a tradition- 
ally rich person, of a mighty Kaiser. ‘The more 
intensely the deprivation was felt the more forci- 
ble is this imaginary abstract ideal constructed 
and starting therefrom begins the formation and 
classification of the given psychical forces to pre- 
paratory attitudes, facilities and traits of charac- 
ter. The individual then carries these traits of 
character demanded by the fictive goal just as 
the mask of the ancient actor—persona—was re- 
quired to fit to the dénouement of the tragedy. 
Should there stir in a boy doubt concerning his 
manliness, as happens in constitutionally in- 
ferior children, feeling as they do to be kindred 
to girls, he chooses a goal of such a nature as 
will give him mastery over women (usually also 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 79 


over allmen). Through this his attitude toward 
women is determined at an early age. He will 
constantly show a tendency to bring about his 
superiority over women, will undervalue and de- 
grade the feminine sex, will, figuratively speak- 
ing—raise the hand against his mother, which in 
neurotically disposed children often finds expres- 
sion in a gesture or in their psychic attitude, and 
will in a playful manner take his model from the 
mother in order to test himself in the manly role 
before it. The development of this sort of in- 
fantile attitude of readiness where a rigid pedan- 
tic behavior becomes manifest, where the child’s 
excited desire for mastery seeks a confirmation, 
and an assurance of his ego-consciousness, simi- 
lar to the one he has experienced from his mother, 
that is, conditions in which he is able in the same 
manner to satisfy his craving for security is al- 
ready to be looked upon as a neurotic trait. Itis 
only to this neurotic fixity of the uncertainty that 
Nietzsche’s assertion is applicable, namely that 
“every one carries within him a portrait of 
womankind which he has derived from his mother, 
and which makes him honor woman or despise 
her or entertain a total indifference toward her.” 
Yet we must concede that these individuals are 
in the majority. Among them are many who 
were disdained by their mother, since which time 


80 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


they fear a like setback from every woman, or 
demand from her an extraordinary measure of 
surrender. 

In the life and development of man there is 
nothing that sets to work with greater secrecy 
than the construction of the ideal of personality. 
If we inquire into.the cause of this secrecy, it 
seems that the most important basis lies in the 
combative, not to say hostile character of this 
fiction. It has originated through a constant 
measuring and weighing of the advantages of 
others and must therefore bring about according 
to the principle of antithesis which lies at the root 
of this process, the injury to others. The psy- 
chological analysis of the neurotic shows always 
the presence of the tendency to depreciation, 
which is summarily directed toward every one. 
The combative tendencies‘ become regularly 
manifest in greed, in envy, in longing for superi- 
ority. But the fiction of gaining the mastery 
over others can only be used, be taken into ac- 
count if it does not disturb the combination of 
relations from the beginning. And therefore, 
this fiction must early become unrecognizable, 
must assume a disguise, or it destroys itself. 
This disguise takes place by the positing of an 
anti-fiction, which first of all directs visible con- 
duct, and under the stress of which reality is ap- 


7S. “Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und in der Neurose.” 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 81 


proached, and the recognition of its effective 
forces is accomplished. This contrary fiction, al- 
ways of the nature of current, corrective in- 
stances, brings about the formal change of the 
guiding fiction by pressing its own claim to con- 
sideration, by presenting for recognition social 
and ethical demands at their true value and thus 
assuring the reasonableness of thinking and act- 
ing. It is the security coefficient of the guiding 
line to power and the harmony of the two fictions, 
their mutual compatibility which is the sign of 
mental health. In the contrary fiction are active 
experience and education, social and cultural 
formulas, and the traditions of society. In times 
of good humor, of security, of normal conditions, 
of peace, this is the prevailing form, which causes 
a restraint of the combative predispositions and 
effects an adaptation of the traits of charac- 
ter to the environment. Should the insecurity 
increase and the consciousness of inferiority 
emerge, then the contrary-fiction is deprived of 
value because of an increasing abstraction from 
reality, the dexterities become mobilized, the 
nervous dogmatic character asserts itself and 
with it the exaggerated sense of ego-ideal. It 
is one of the triumphs of human wit to put 
through the guiding fiction by adapting it to the 
antifiction, to shine through modesty, to conquer 
by humility and submissiveness, to humiliate 


82 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


others by one’s virtues, to attack others by one’s 
own passivity, to cause pain to others by one’s 
own suffering, to strive to attain the goal of 
manly force by effeminate means, to make one- 
self small in order to appear great. Of such 
sort, however, are often the expedients of neu- 
rotics. 

Concerning the significance of the most primi- 
tive perception and emotion as an abstraction I 
need waste no words. Just as abstract is the 
positing of an imaginary guiding point and of 
this life plan which is now spun out between these 
two points. With reference to the neurotic psy- 
che we have repeatedly emphasized that it is 
the greater insecurity which alone tends to with- 
draw the guiding point still further from reality, 
to set it higher. In addition to this the inferior 
sense organs yield qualitatively and quantita- 
tively changed sensations, and the organs of exe- 
cution a changed technique usually in the sense 
of greater limitation, so that the self-esteem, the 
ideal guiding representation, the representation 
of the world and the life plan must be formed 
differently from normal representations of this 
sort, in that they are more abstract, less in con- 
formity with reality. In this process it is true 
the compensation and over-compensation may 
sometimes bring the conception of the world and 
the line of reality nearer together as in the great 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 83 


performances of the neurotic psyche. The over- 
tense personal ideal, however, which acquires ab- 
solute rigidity, which assumes nearly an identity 
with God, often lends to the nature and behavior 
of the neurotic and psychotic a pronounced hypo- 
manic character, if the preparations therefore, 
the feeling of insignificance, the ideas of perse- 
cution did not counteract this character by caus- 
ing a sort of inner certainty without which the 
positing of the goal would be impossible, by caus- 
ing a feeling of predestination. In the phases 
of greater insecurity this characteristic is consid- 
erably stronger and its significance as anticipation 
of the guiding fiction, as payment on account 
becomes distinctly obvious. 

Gustav Freytag in his “Reminiscences of my 
Life” describes the usefulness of the compensa- 
tory performance in the following manner: 

“But too the bull’s-eye-shot on the target is 
difficult tome. For at Oels I had noticed during 
the instruction that I was very near sighted. 
When I complained of this during the vacation 
to my father, he advised me to make my way 
through the world without glasses and told me a 
story illustrating the helplessness of a theologist 
who had made him get up out of bed one morn- 
ing to hunt his spectacles so that he could find his 
trousers. I followed this advice and have accus- 
tomed myself to the use of spectacles only at the 


84 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


theater and in looking at pictures. I sought to 
overcome the disadvantages under which I la- 
bored in society from this defect and overlooked 
much unsuspectedly which would have disgusted 
a sharper observer. I was often obliged to 
forego the enjoyment of flowers, beauty in dress, 
of remarkable countenances and beauty in women 
from which others derived pleasure. But as the 
same adjusted itself adroitly to this defect of 
sense, there was soon developed in me a good un- 
derstanding of those expressions of life which 
came within my range of vision and a quick divi- 
nation of much which was not clear to me; the 
smaller number of the perceptions permitted me 
to elaborate those which were perceived with 
greater ease and perhaps more profoundly. At 
any rate the loss was greater than the gain. But 
my father was thus far right, my eyes preserved 
unchanged throughout my entire life their keen- 
ness of vision at close distances.” 

If one imagines the development of a visual 
phantasy of this sort which constantly draws 
away from reality goaded by the pressure of the 
craving for security, there results for the same 
purpose of obtaining security as in the above 
cited example, an ability to produce visual hallu- 
cinations which can manifest itself even outside 
of dream states, for the purpose of presenting 
warnings to preserve personal security and en- 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 85 


couraging consolations. The abstractions and 
also the anticipations have even gone farther and 
may lead to the well known remarkable patho- 
logical expressions of the “telepaths” or Cassan- 
dra natures. The disquieting consciousness of 
inferiority gives a terrible incentive to this reach- 
ing out beyond the limits of human possibilities 
here as in other instances, and this consciousness 
finding refuge in weakness ascribes to others a 
greater power of vision, as though they could see 
what was hidden, could read the thoughts. The 
child in his craving for security with his natural 
secrecy may early incline to just this point in 
order to gain security, and act under the imagi- 
nary assumption that others can “see into his 
heart,” can divine his most. hidden thoughts, an 
assumption which often makes its appearance as 
an expedient in the neurosis and psychosis and 
has the same value as the exaggerated feeling of 
guilt, perhaps, and neurotic conscientiousness, 
and whose purpose is to avoid a degradation of 
self-esteem, shame, punishment, mockery, hu- 
miliation, the feminine role, death. 

The increased capacity of the neurotic for ab- 
stractions for anticipations is not only at the root 
of his hallucinatory character, of his fantasies 
and his dreams but also of the over-exertion of 
organ functioning of which he makes use in pur- 
poseful efforts as preparations for the combat. 


86 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Thus the neurotic makes for himself a place by 
more abstract prevision and premeditation, and 
constructs thereof, that neurotic foresight which 
is regularly present in this disease, by means of 
which the patient holds the possibilities of expe- 
rience constantly before him arranged dogmati- 
cally and in sharply antithetical groups accord- 
ing to the Scheme “Triumph—Defeat.” Or he 
places his environment under ban by heightening 
the sensibility of his organs (which is the first step 
towards hallucinations) showing hypersensibil- 
ity to smells, sounds, touch, temperature, tastes 
and pains, and this brings his undertakings con- 
stantly into harmony with his imaginary mascu- 
line guiding principle. Foolishness and super- 
stitious convictions of a hopeless destiny, the firm 
seated belief in one’s own ill luck serve the same 
purpose of satisfying the craving for security by 
constructing the proof that caution is necessary. 
The hallucinatory awakening of anxiety works 
in the same direction, of which the neurotic makes 
extensive use. 

That the traits of character as well as the emo- 
tional predispositions serve the guiding fiction, it 
is the purpose of this book to prove to the fullest 
degree. ‘The guiding line of the neurotic leading 
in a directly perpendicular line upwards de- 
mands peculiar expedients and forms of life 
which are included under the little uniform con- 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 87 


cept of the neurotic symptoms. Now one finds 
safety-devices at remote places, prohibitory ar- 
rangements, protective combats, for the purpose 
of assuring success to the central impulse, the will 
to power, then again there are, and these are often 
difficult to understand, circuitous ways compa- 
rable to secret paths, taken so as not to lose the 
guiding line when the direct way to the masculine 
triumph is barred. Often a change of nervous 
phenomena is observed which resembles tentative 
experiments, until the more severe symptom 
guarantees a concordance with the guiding idea. 

I believe too that I have presented in the 
present work these symptoms and their psycho- 
genesis coherently and to a sufficient extent. 
They all rest on dexterity acquired by long 
practice and preparation whose hypervalency is 
supported through the medium of and is founded 
on the fitness for the combat to preserve the ideal 
self-esteem. The preparations themselves com- 
mence in the beginning of the neurosis, accom- 
pany the development of the idea of personal 
worth and are adapted to it. They are most 
clearly recognized in the reminiscences of child- 
hood which have been presented in the oft re- 
turning dreams, in the mimic, the habitus, in the 
play of children, in their phantasies, concerning 
future vocations, concerning the future. 

It lies in the nature of the too elevated guiding 


88 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


idea that it should estrange the person who en- 
tertains it, that is the neurotic, from reality. 
Not infrequently this condition manifests itself 
in a “feeling of strangeness” which is again over- 
estimated and used with a view to a certain effect, 
1.e., to recommend a cautious retreat in an inse- 
cure situation. Apparently opposite to this 
“back” an unjustified feeling of confidence in a 
situation, the feeling of “deja vu” sometimes be- 
comes manifest, often in the form of a concealed 
analogy for the purpose of warning or encourag- 
ing.” In neurotic students I have sometimes ob- 
served that led by the feeling of their predestina- 
tion scholars have sought a hearing on subjects 
with which they were wholly unfamiliar with the 
result of total failure. Such experiences may 
cause the neurotic to be suspicious of his empha- 
sized feeling of “self-confidence” which may 
emerge, as though he preserved a bad after-taste. 
The security through the exaggerated idea of 
self-esteem and the adherence to it determines 
often the feeling of or even a real condition of 
estrangement from the world, which indeed is 
usually exaggerated with a definite purpose. 
Fear for everything now, ponderousness, awk- 


8 The feeling of strangeness and the feeling of familiarity in 
the neurosis are analogous to the image of warning and exhortation 
of an inner voice in the dream, the hallucination and the attitude in 
the psychosis. 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 89 


wardness, bashfulness, then accompany the neu- 
rotic who avoids reality and reveals his efforts to 
reinterpret, reconstruct and remodel it. This 
deficiency also seeks its compensation and in less 
severe cases finds it in the antifiction leading to 
reality, which again in an abstract, usually urgent 
form seeks to over-estimate the significance of 
the reality from exaggerated fear of it in order 
to raise up preparations against error and defect 
at all times. The vacillation between the ideal 
and the real manifests itself in an extreme way 
in the neurotic psyche, in which the passion for 
doubting assumes the form of a paradigm for the 
real “truth,” as the final goal of power which 
the neurotic is to attain. Or the outer forms are 
pedantically held to and over-estimated as is a 
fetish, and as though they guaranteed security. 
The following sentence from Hebel’s letters ° 
seems to me to indicate this feature. 

“One can never pay sufficient honor to the 
outer forms which in youth are so thoughtlessly 
ridiculed, for they are the only lines which assist 
in making decisions in the restlessly changing 
world without law or order”— In small things 
as in great this craving for security is always 
manifested and humanity is always seeking it by 
analogies, and by abstract dogmatic methods. 


9R. W. Werner, from Hebel’s youth, Oesterreichische Rund- 
schau, 1911. 


90 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The frequency of sexual guiding lines in the 
neuroses is explained in unprejudiced analyses 
upon the following grounds: 

1. Because they furnish a suitable form of ex- 
pression for the masculine protest. 

2. Because it lies within the option of the 
patient to feel them as real. 

Therefore, the adaptation of the sexual im- 
aginary guiding line depends also on its value in 
procuring security for the feeling of self-esteem, 
on its significance as an abstraction and quality 
of exciting hallucinations, and on its quality of 
easily receiving a concrete form and because it 
admits of anticipations. 

According to this the hallucinatory character of 
the neurotic is a peculiar instance of the mecha- 
nism of security. It makes use, as does thinking 
and speech, of the primitive recollections reduced 
to the smallest dynamic measure to which he is 
drawn by means of the abstracting power of the 
craving for security. Its function and office is 
to calculate the way to the desired heights by use 
of analogy from experiences which have their 
place in childhood in emphasizing set-backs that 
have been endured or comforting memories of 
evils that have been overcome. 

The hallucinatory power represents a com- 
pleted preparation accomplished by the over- 
strained craving for security, and takes its ma- 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 91 


terial, as does also the function of thought and 
premeditation from the cast-iron element of the 
neurotically directed memory. That which is 
called regression in dream and in hallucinations 
by other writers is the every-day process of 
thought which gropes back to experience, and can 
only refer to the material of the dreams and hal- 
lucinations, but never to their dynamics. 

The psychic dynamic of an hallucination con- 
sist therefore in this, that in a situation of uncer- 
tainty, a guiding line is sought with might and is 
hypostasized by means of an abstraction, per 
analogium with the evaluation of experience, by 
means of anticipation and by means of a fictitious 
rendition of something closely related to a sensory 
perception. This latter ability as the most effec- 
tive means of expression may, by reason of the 
anti-fiction which inclines to reality, be felt as in 
conscious opposition to reality as in dreams, or in 
the craving for security dissolves the anti-fiction 
and permits the hallucination to be felt as real. 

Jodl defined civilization as “the increased ef- 
fort of man under certain circumstances and with 
special intensity to secure his person and life 
against hostile powers of nature as well as from 
the antagonism of his fellow men, to satisfy his 
needs both real and ideal in a greater measure 
and to bring his nature without obstacle to devel- 
opment.” 


92 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The neurotic individual holds the guiding line 
much more constantly in view, but may accord- 
ingly need to bring to expression schematically 
and dogmatically the guiding line which leads to 
the transcendental or the anti-fiction which tends 
to culture, the latter in the sense of a neurotic 
circuitous way, in which, for example, he seems 
to submit to an extreme degree to the “antago- 
nism of his fellow men” for the purpose of tri- 
umphing over them. 

The evolution of the effort to bring his nature 
to the fullest development, to attain the pinnacle 
of that which the neurotic individual may call his 
culture leads us back again to the already men- 
tioned preparations so important from a psycho- 
logical point of view, to the tentative efforts 
which are supposed to be introduced by the orig- 
inal consciousness of inferiority. 

All the imperfect organs in a state of infantile 
development strive with all their connate capaci- 
ties and possibilities of development to form pur- 
poseful, so to speak intelligent preparatory ar- 
rangements. In the efforts of the constitution- 
ally inferior organs with their numerous abortive 
performances arises, aS a consequence of the 
greater tension in the presence of the require- 
ments of the external world, the impression of 
uncertainty, the self-esteem of the child brings 
forward a permanent consciousness of inferiority. 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 93 


Thus it happens that already in early childhood 
the mastery of the situation according to an ex- 
ample taken as a model or to dominate the situ- 
ation even far beyond the power indicated in the 
model is taken as the guiding motive and a per- 
manent impulse of will is founded which hands 
over the permanent guidance to a directing idea 
—‘the will to power.” ‘The positing of a goal in 
the neurotic character is a phase of the same tend- 
ency. ‘This goal corresponds consciously or un- 
consciously to the formula: “I must act in such 
a way that in the end I become the master of the 
situation.” Long continuation of the child in 
the phase of consciousness of inferiority leads to 
a heightening and strengthening of the intensity 
of that formula, so that from the unusual inten- 
sity of all efforts, the preparatory actions and the 
predispositions, the traits of character of any 
period of development may be inferred as original 
consciousness of inferiority. Also in organs fall- 
ing below the normal standard the tentative ef- 
forts are manifested, which produce preparations 
and expedients in walking, seeing, eating, hear- 
ing. Exner emphasizes that these tentative ef- 
forts are like those which precede the grasping 
of the sound combinations when children are 
learning to speak. Much more convulsive in 
form are the preliminary processes in the defec- 
tive organ, whose preparations and methods of 


94 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


functioning in favorable examples of over-com- 
pensation, are in height, light artistic perform- 
ances and perfection, but which often as in the 
neurosis because of the close guard kept and the 
cautiousness, rarely attain full development. 
The child seeks to learn his faults in the way 
offered him by the craving for security, and seeks 
to remedy them or to gain advantage from them 
in using them as an expedient. As he does not 
know the real reason for his inferiority, often 
from pride does not wish to know them, he is 
easily misled to ascribe them to external reasons, 
to blame the “spits of objects” or usually, his rel- 
atives, and assumes then an aggressive, hostile 
attitude to the real objective world. Usually he 
retains a foreboding, a presentiment of ill-luck as 
an abstract reminder of his feelings of inferiority, 
which he is likely to exaggerate, often develops 
to a feeling of guilt, if circumstances admit of 
this, in order to unfold his pre-vision, his fore- 
sight with good reason. ‘The neurotic endeavors 
are above all directed towards enlarging and se- 
curing the boundaries of self-esteem by con- 
stantly estimating and testing the powers in the 
difficulties of the objective world. 

To over-exertion in this effort may be traced 
many of the traits of the neurotic—his inclination 
to play with fire, to make dangerous situations 
and hunt for them, his pleasure in the gruesome 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 95 


and the diabolical (Michel). The inclination to 
crime, like the sadistic inclination lies in the mas- 
culine guiding line, but is often neutralized by the 
contradictory idea which develops and is more 
often exaggerated in memory, with the purpose 
of warning from execution. 

Nervousness, by preference, utilizes organic 
defectiveness, the infantile defects, the sense of 
ill-health in general, on the one hand for the pur- 
pose of securing the ego-consciousness against the 
requirements of parental authority, usually by 
means of a stubborn revolt on the other hand 
for the purpose of postponing by a sort of arti- 
ficial obstruction decisions and collisions which 
might be dangerous to the masculine fiction, that 
is to say, the relinquishing of certain positions 
of advantage in order to retain more impor- 
tant ones. Indeed the neurotic individual often 
seeks minor defeats, even brings them about arti- 
ficially, or assumes dangerous outlooks in order 
thereby to justify his neurotic acts and caution. 
In neurotically retained childhood defects a spe- 
cial refractoriness and strong aggression against 
the father and mother may be expected. 

Thus a compulsory striving toward the under- 
standing of objective difficulties, efforts to over- 
come them, to gain the mastery, to combat them, 
undervaluation and depreciation of life and its 
joys or flight from them characterize a phase of 


96 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


the neurosis. Along with this the fact very fre- 
quently comes to light that the patient is very 
enthusiastic for life, for work, for love and mar- 
riage, but platonically, while secretly he bars the 
access to them through the neurosis, in order to 
make sure of his domination in the more limited 
field of the family with the father and mother. 
This outwardly directed anxious and cautious 
glance of the neurotic which is intended to pre- 
serve the guiding fiction is regularly accompa- 
nied by a self-observation of a higher intensity. 
Sometimes in a situation of psychic uncertainty 
the personified, deified guiding idea is met with 
as a second self, as an inner voice like the Damon 
of Socrates which warns, encourages, punishes, 
accuses. And that which the neurasthenics and 
hypochondriacs relate to us concerning the man- 
ner in which they inwardly rage, how keenly they 
examine and follow every act of their lives is 
true of neurotics generally. The self-observa- 
tion may lead to a limitation of the field of com- 
bat, through it it utilizes expressions of fear of 
sickness, by means of which the neurotic individ- 
ual is always in a position to beat a retreat for the 
sake of security. It must be thought of as effec- 
tive, when the primitive expedients for gaining 
security, such as anxiety, shame, bashfulness, or 
the more complex ones, as modesty, conscientious- 
ness, nervous attacks, accompany the presenti- 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 97 


ment of a defeat, in order not to allow the self- 
esteem to sink below the required level. Self- 
observation and self-esteem always excited and 
reénforced by the guiding fiction so that a base 
of operation is offered and the aggressions in- 
troduced produce immediately the neurotic, dog- 
‘matic traits of character, of envy, greed, tyranny, 
etc. The exaggerated introspection plays a con- 
stant role in the continuous measuring and 
wrestling of the neurotic individual to test his 
own worth against that of others, it gives hints 
to premeditation and phantasy and announces its 
presence when the patient avoids making a de- 
cision or when for the same purpose he gives him- 
self up permanently to doubt. 

That all these introspections originate from 
the feeling of insufficiency and are influenced by 
it is Just as easy to understand, as that they 
finally reach the goal to which they in reality 
tend, i.e., caution. ‘Thus introspection is at once 
hesitation, egotism, megalomania, doubt, self-de- 
preciatory psychosis, and stands in connection 
with all other phenomena which are caused by the 
consciousness of inferiority. It serves especially 
for the reénforcement and testing of the masculine 
protest, of characteristics such as courage, pride, 
ambition, etc., as well as the purpose of increas- 
ing all those tendencies whose acme is security, 
such as economy, exactness, industry, cleanliness. 


98 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


It influences the attention and serves also to 
dominate it, so that it occupies a prominent posi- 
tion in that mesh of traits whose object it is to 
gain security. The results, however, at which it 
arrives are purposely falsified. It would be very 
erroneous to regard it as libidinous or as pleasure 
producing. Its funetion is rather to group all 
the impressions of the objective world and to 
bring them under a single test, in such a way, so 
to speak, that the primary uncertainty of the in- 
dividual shall be assured from being unmasked 
by a mathematical or statistical guarantee accord- 
ing to the standard of probability, i.e., that the 
individual shall escape a defeat. I first called at- 
tention to the dynamic of the neurosis in the 
“Neurotic Disposition” and the object of the 
present work is to present it in a more profound 
and extended form. The purposeful and pro- 
found introspection, therefore, is in line with the 
neurosis, even though in philosophy, psychology 
and in self-knowledge it has produced excellent 
fruit. It is the private philosophy of the neu- 
rotic which fails to hit the mark of reality, and 
whose mania, corrigible by analysis, has its anal- 
ogy in the “know thyself” of the sublime philoso- 
phers. The largely incorrigible delirium of the 
psychotics brooding and phantastic introspection, 
which is so much easier to comprehend as a sys- 
tematized illusion with the object of assuring 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 99 


self-esteem, teaches us to understand the delirium 
of the introspection of the neurotic. 

The neurotic’s striving for security, his very 
stronghold, can therefore only be understood 
when the original, contrary factor of his uncer- 
tainty is likewise taken into consideration. Both 
are the result of an antithetically grouped judg- 
ment which has come to depend on the fictitious 
egotistic ideal, which furnishes to this judgment 
biased “subjective” values. The feeling of “‘se- 
curity” and its opposite pole of “insecurity” ar- 
ranged according to the antithesis of “feeling 
inferiority” and “egotistic ideal” are like these 
latter a fictitious pair of values, a psychic for- 
mation of which Vaihinger says “that the real in 
them is artificially placed there, that only when 
taken together have they meaning and value, 
taken singly, however, they lead through their 
isolation to nonsense, contradictions and illusion- 
ary problems. In the analysis of psychoneu- 
roses it always becomes obvious that this antithe- 
sis resolves itself in accordance with the only real 
“antithesis” of “man—woman,” so that the feel- 
ing of inferiority, uncertainty, lowliness, effemi- 
nacy, falls on one side of the table, the antithesis 
of certainty, superiority, self-esteem, manliness, 
on the other. The dynamics of the neurosis can 
therefore be regarded (and is often so understood 
by the neurotic because of its irradiation upon his 


100 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


psyche) as if the patient wished to change from 
awomantoaman. This effect yields in its most 
highly colored form the picture of that which I 
have called the “masculine protest.” 

The strength of the manly element in the idea 
of cultural perfection as well as more particularly 
in the artificial guiding lines of neurotics as we 
find it in the wishes and actions, thoughts and 
feelings of our patients, in their attitude toward 
the objective world, in their preparations for life, 
in every trait of character, in every physical and 
psychical gesture, which gives the impulse to the 
upward movement and directs the line of life up- 
ward, permits us to divine that in the beginning 
of psychical development a deficiency of such 
manly power was felt, and that the original feel- 
ing of inferiority realized by the constitutionally 
defective child was estimated as feminine in con- 
formity with this antithesis. No matter what 
was at the foundation of the feeling of infe- 
riority, when the strong neurotic stronghold is 
introduced through the setting up of the mas- 
culine fiction, the supposed basis of the childish 
uncertainty and the uncertainty itself fall under 
the phenomena which are considered as effemi- 
nate as a consequence of the neurotic, antithet- 
ical grouping. The feeling of insignificance, of 
weakness, of anxiety and helplessness, of ill 
health, of deficiency, of pain, etc., produces in 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 101 


the neurotic actions of such a nature that he 
seems to be compelled to set up a defense against 
effeminacy, that is to say, to be obliged to act in 
a manly and forceful manner. In the same man- 
ner this answer follows, the affect-possibilities of 
the masculine protest react against every degra- 
dation, against the feeling of uncertainty, of be- 
ing injured, of inferiority, and the neurotic indi- 
vidual draws constantly effective guiding lines 
for his volition, action and thoughts in the form 
of traits of character in the broad chaotic field of 
his soul, in order not to miss the way to the 
heights, in order to make his security complete. 
Usually the traits of character tend in a direct 
line of the masculine ideal in both the male and 
the female patients, but the neurotic circuitous 
ways, attacks and predispositions to attack espe- 
cially following the decisive defeat whose analysis 
and arrangements in the ensemble reveals the 
same tendency to the heightening of the mascu- 
line ego-consciousness, manifest themselves as in 
accordance with the above given expositions, even 
though from an outside view and superficially 
considered they may appear to be timidity, anx- 
iety, effeminacy, and may be regarded as flight or 
retreat from the world. The simple question 
concerning the stability of the far fetched expedi- 
ent in the form of a neurotic symptom enables us 
to understand that in these latter cases it is not 


102 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


because a decision has been reached, but because 
the originally constructed imaginary masculine 
goal is effective now as it was before and that a 
cultural adaptation, peace and contentment, can- 
not be maintained, because the goal is set too high. 

Through certain uncertainties of the child con- 
cerning his own sex-role the masculine element in 
the guiding fiction is considerably reénforced. 
In fact one observes that children retain a re- 
markable interest for differences of sexuality in 
a hidden form. The similarity of dress in chil- 
dren in the first years, the feminine features in 
small boys, and masculine in girls, certain threats 
of the parents as “a boy will change himself into 
a girl” reproaches to the boy that he is like a girl, 
to a girl that she is like a boy, may still increase 
this uncertainty, as long as the differences in the 
genital organs are unknown. But even where 
there is the fullest explanation, doubt may 
awaken through anomalies of the genital organs 
in erroneous judgments, which may be retained 
and emerge constantly in later life in the antithet- 
ical picture of “masculine-feminine” so that our 
original statement *° that the doubt of his own 
sex-role is at the foundation of the neurotic doubt 
needs extension only in one direction, i.e., that 
the neurosis holds fast to this condition of doubt 


10 “Psychic Hemaphrodism in Life and in the Neurosis.” l. c. 
and the later publications, 


a 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 103 


in the patient subsequently as a security against 
the necessity of decadency, in order to construct 
the “hesitating attitude.” 

The longer the uncertainty as to the sex-röle 
exists, the more urgent becomes the effort and 
tentative preparation to attain the masculine 
role. ‘Thus originates the original picture of the 
“masculine protest” which has as aim to force the 
one in whom it exists under all circumstances into 
the seemingly most masculine attitude, or, as is 
the case with girls and boys, who early become 
neurotic, to prevent set-backs in all forms by neu- 
rotic expedients, simultaneously, however, to 
build up directly masculine traits of character 
and strong affect-predisposition. 

The fore-stage of the knowledge of the sex- 
role, that is the period of psychic hermaphrodit- 
ism of the child exists generally. Attention has 
been called to its importance by Dessoir and my- 
self. That this stadium with its strong endeav- 
ors in the direction of the masculine guiding line 
is of the greatest significance for the develop- 
ment of the neurosis with its too elevated manly 
goal and its expedients for gaining security was 
demonstrated to me by the analysis of the psy- 
choneurosis. Goethe proves himself to be a good 
observer and connoisseur of nature when he says 
in Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Consignment, 
“Just as at certain periods in their life, children 


104 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


begin to pay attention to the differences in the sex 
of their parents, and their glances through the 
envelopes which conceal these secrets bring forth 
very wonderful emotions in their nature, so it was 
with Wilhelm in this discovery ; he was more quiet 
and less quiet than before, thought he had learned 
something and just from this perceived that he 
knew nothing.” 

In fact one finds as the first expression of this 
inexperience and its depressing reaction upon the 
psyche an enormous amount of curiosity and 
craving for knowledge and in order to find orien- 
tation in life notwithstanding this the child comes 
under the influence of the guiding line which im- 
pels him to act as though he must know every- 
thing. Should he happen to find out the supe- 
riority of the manly principle in our society, the 
guiding model becomes masculine, especially if 
a man, the father appears to him to be the person 
with knowledge. 

In the case of little girls peculiar traits of char- 
acter which become especially prominent in the 
neurosis develop when they try to hold fast to the 
masculine guiding line. The feeling of having 
suffered an injury has just as much weight with 
them as for boys who consider themselves female, 
so that they put all their interest into collecting 
proof of their injury and building up their ag- 
gression against their environment. 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 105 


Imaginary pictures of castration, of man 
changed to woman, woman to man, of masculine 
forms of life, emerge in the analysis as indicators 
of the neurotic psyche, point to the craving for 
equality with man and permit the masculine fic- 
tion to reémerge constantly in the later changes 
of form of the guiding line. "These neurotics reg- 
ularly assume an attitude toward life as though 
they had suffered an injury, or as though they 
were constantly seeking with the greatest caution, 
to avoid a loss. 

EK. H. Meyer says in the “Indo-Germanic 
Myths” (I. S. 16), “According to the Atharva 
Veda the Gandharvs (phallic Demons) consume 
the testicles of boys and thus transform the boys 
into girls.” The ideas of many neurotics in 
childhood seem to have assumed this and similar 
forms concerning the origination of the two sexes, 
as if from thoughts concerning a degradation 
which has been suffered and which assumes the 
form of a sexual transformation with the woman. 
The immediate psychical result is then as a rule 
more acute aggression against the parents, to 
whom is ascribed the blame for this shortcoming. 

Flies, Halban, Weininger, and before them, 
among others, Schopenhauer and Krafft-Ebing, 
founded the psychic hermaphroditism on the 
presence of a hypothetical male and female sub- 
stance in the individual. Our concept supposes 


106 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


only the antithesis in the valuation of male and 
female as it actually exists, takes into account the 
universality of the antithetical figurative apper- 
ception-scheme “male-female” and deduces from 
the pressure of the neurotically reénforced and 
heightened egotistic ideal the masculine factor 
which is so easily discoverable. The latter condi- 
tions also the emphasis of the feeling of inferior- 
ity of the individual by comprehending it in a 
picture which belongs to the feminine role in 
order to react against it with the character traits, 
the impulses, and preparations of the masculine 
protest. ‘The findings published by me have 
been taken up in a series of the latest works from 
the Freudian school. A further pursuance of 
the matter leads irrevocably to a realization of the 
untenableness of the libido-theory, to a doing 
away with the sexual etiology and to an under- 
standing of the neurotic sexual conduct as a fic- 
tion. 

If the masculine protest has thus become clear 
to us as an expedient of the psyche by means of 
which it attains full security, and strives to bring 
itself in conformity with the guiding egotistic 
idea, it still remains to present to view the formal 
change of this guiding line as it takes place every 
time contradictions become apparent in it and the 
purpose of neurotic efforts to maintain superior- 
ity is Jeopardized. This is the case when reality 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 107 


threatens the egotistic ideal with degradation. 
The neurotic in this case will cling more tena- 
ciously to his idea than the normal person. The 
more deeply, however, he becomes entangled in 
the reassuring neurosis, the more likely is he, 
being assisted by memories and warnings, to an- 
ticipate an injury, to construct new neurotic cir- 
cuitous ways, to apply further neurotic expedi- 
ents for security which for a problem under 
consideration contain neither a fiat nor a nega- 
tion, or more likely both at once. 

His psychic hermaphroditic character will also 
manifest itself in the circumstance that he yields, 
becomes submissive, effeminate, while his efforts 
at the same time reveal a pressure towards a 
tendency to dominate, toward manliness, with the 
result that he makes no progress, because for 
every step he takes forward he takes one back- 
ward, and sometimes even expresses this proce- 
dure in pantomime. In the same way the fear of 
blame, of punishment, of shame, in short of being 
“down” may alter his straightforward manly 
traits. The construction of the neurotic feelings 
of guilt, of congenital criminal instincts, of rough- 
ness, of cruelty, and egotism bear fear-inspiring 
signs in the same ways as the feelings of bashful- 
ness, cowardice, dullness and laziness when these 
latter are brought neurotically to expression. 
The bad, intractable child, the years of wild oats, 


108 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


and certain forms of psychoses, frequently the 
fore-stage of the “developed neurosis,” show us 
the masculine protest in a high, rectilinear devel- 
opment. ‘Their performances are produced di- 
rectly by the surge of the masculine protest which 
has become an end in itself and which represents 
wholly and entirely the reénforced guiding fic- 
tion. 

Our theoretical presentation of the neurotic 
psyche would be incomplete, if it did not also 
enter upon the subject of the nature and signifi- 
cance of dreams. I can in this place advance no 
well founded theory of dreams, to say nothing of 
a complete one. But for various reasons I am 
obliged to communicate all the observations and 
findings which have rendered possible the study 
of dreams in the practical part of the work. 

Freud’s interpretation of dreams was perhaps 
the greatest step in advance which has been made 
in our understanding of the psychology of the 
neuroses. And yet I cannot regard it as the final 
step in our knowledge of dreams. In the course 
of an observation of dreams extending over many 
years of healthy and unhealthy persons I have 
arrived at the following result: 

1. The dream is a sketch-like reflection of psy- 
chic attitudes and indicates for the investigator 
the characteristic manner in which the dreamer 
takes his attitude in regard to a certain problem. 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 109 


It coincides therefore, with the form of the fic- 
titious guiding line, yields only efforts of pre- 
meditation, tentative preparations of an aggres- 
sive attitude and can therefore be utilized to great 
advantage for the purpose of understanding these 
individual preparations, predispositions, and the 
guiding fiction itself. 

2. In the same way there comes to light in the 
dream, in a more or less abstract manner, the 
dreamer’s attitude towards the world about him 
as well as his traits of character 1! and their neu- 
rotic abnormalities. The abstraction in dream- 
thought is necessitated by the craving for secur- 
ity, which seeks to solve a problem by simplifying 
it and by referring it to a less complete infantile 
stage. This it accomplishes in a manner which 
is true of thinking generally, except that it is 
more profound. It makes use too of memory, 
and in a figurative analogical manner, through 
the hallucinatory awakening of memories of a 
fear-inspiring or energy-exciting sort. The ex- 
clusion of reality by sleep favors the abstract 
thinking in dreams, as correction is to a great 
part prevented by the insensibility of the sense 
organs. To this circumstance as well as to the 
absence of a conscious positing of purpose in 

11G. Chr. Lichtenberg already wrote—If people were to relate 


accurately their dreams, their character cou'd be read from them 
sooner than from the face. 


110 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


dream thought is due the incomprehensibility of 
the contents of dreams, which only receive mean- 
ing when taken as symbols of life, as an “as if” 
for which the interpretation has to supply the 
real aggression. 

3. These facts which still remain to be proved 
as well as the form of expression of the dream in 
an “as if” (“It seemed to me as if”) reveal to us 
the nature of the dream as a factor in which those 
tentative efforts and tasks become manifest by 
which caution seeks to gain the mastery of a situ- 
ation in the future. In the dreams of neurotic 
persons it is possible, therefore, to observe more 
distinctly than in others the neurotic methods of 
apperception which work according to the prin- 
ciple of an antithesis, the emphasized feeling of 
inferiority and the guiding egotistic idea, or to 
divine them in connection with the mental life of 
these persons. 

4. The tendency of the neurotically reénforced 
guiding idea will be revealed regularly in the 
dreams of a neurotic person, usually in the form 
of a striving to attain a position “above” or the 
masculine protest. The feminine or “under” 
base of operation is always indicated. 

5. Repeated dreams of the same content and 
dreams of childhood reveal the fictitious guiding 
line most distinctly. Because they construct 
themselves upon a completed scheme or one that 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 111 


is in a condition to be used which is erected and 
sustained by the neurotic final purpose. The 
various dreams of a night indicate this attempt 
at various solutions and are a characteristic of the 
feeling of extreme uncertainty. The so-called 
censor of dreams by means of which is accom- 
plished a concealment or disguising of actual facts 
by distortion, reveals itself as the craving for 
security which accomplishes the formal change 
of the fiction in the neurosis as well as in the 
dream, and seeks to avoid by a circuitous way 
a contradiction in the masculine guiding line. 
Other disfigurations are inherent in the nature of 
the more abstract dream thinking and in its char- 
acter as a mere reflection. 

6. The symbolisms and expedients of analogy 
in dreams are radiations containing forms and 
contents of dynamic affect reénforcements, their 
word-pictures, so to speak. They are a psychic 
superstructure over a compromise between a 
psychic situation and a biased, usually falsified, 
sophistically applied souvenir which must sup- 
ply the resonance required by the idea. 

The fulfillment of infantile wishes in dreams 
asserted by Freud is solved by me by regarding 
it as the effect of premeditation to attain security, 
whereby memories grouped together with a view 
to a certain effect are taken as helps in the form 
of mementoes, a psychic expedient which also 


112 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


dominates all logical thinking, and which are not 
the libidinous or sexual wishes of childhood. 

The only difference between the neurosis and 
normality with its dreams and its delusions is the 
heightened tendency brought about by the re- 
enforced fiction, to choose those memories which 
have been made effective, in short the neurotic 
perspective,—the neurotic does not suffer from 
reminiscences, he makes them. 

If this point of comparison, an absolutely nec- 
essary one for orientation and certainty in action, 
becomes once fixed, a point which is in proportion 
to the degree with which the feeling of inferiority 
weighs upon the child, this point must for the 
above given reasons, from the necessity of mak- 
ing comparisons, and on account of the adjust- 
ments which take place in childhood, become 
stable, hypostasized and regarded as holy, as di- 
vine. On the one hand are the real conditions 
and activities of the subject; on the other hand 
are the compensatory result of the feeling of in- 
feriority, the Deity, the guiding idea apperceived 
in the form of a person or an event. This latter 
ideal point operates now as though all directing 
forces were contained in it. Thus first arises 
from an organic, objective life that which we call 
soul life, the psyche. 

Every step the child takes directs itself accord- 
ing to this system and is in turn directed by it. 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 113 


There is a continuous weighing, feeling, prepara- 
tion, formation of predispositions and measuring 
on the ideal which brings the child forward in 
his development. He measures himself with men 
as well as with women, whereby the contrast be- 
tween the sexes furnishes a guide and produces a 
psychic adjustment in accordance with a contrast 
in a certain sense in a hostile, evasive direction 
in the masculine line. In the neurotically dis- 
posed child, the compensatory craving for secur- 
ity heightened by the feeling of uncertainty is 
responsible, through the over-stimulation of at- 
tention in this direction for the abstract, neu- 
rotically reénforced directing lines to the high- 
flown goal of the masculine protest. And the 
more sharply defined understanding of the con- 
trast of the sexes produces earlier and more pro- 
foundly the preparatory attitudes toward the 
opposite sex, the more so when, as is the case with 
neurotics, the exclusively masculine appraisal of 
the ideal reflects upon his feeling of inferiority 
causing it to appear feminine. 

The nature of home training carries with it the 
result that in his first attempts at formulating 
an ideal of personality, the child pictures to him- 
self traits belonging to the most important mem- 
ber of the family, usually the father. Neuroti- 
cally disposed children who in contrasting them- 
selves with the father experience an accentuation 


114 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


of their feeling of inferiority, immediately hit 
upon preparatory expedients and construct de- 
vices for combat as though they were obliged ta 
demonstrate their superiority to the father. In 
these preparatory efforts is contained also the 
attitude to the opposite sex, in so far as the intel- 
lect of the child does not make a mistake in regard 
to his own sexual role, and many of his predispo- 
sitions which are to come into effectiveness later 
in life are tentatively practiced in a playful man- 
ner upon members of the family of the opposite 
sex, in the waking state or in hallucinations, or 
in his dreams. 

That along with this the mother serves in a 
certain sense as a model for the boy has long been 
known and has been mentioned by Nietzsche. 
The boundary itself which the child sets for him- 
self is also a matter of experiment for him. His 
wishes are, if he be neurotically disposed, bound- 
less. Discontented because of the too great dis- 
tance to his egotistic ideal, he even goes so far as 
to entertain sexual wishes in regard to the mother, 
a proof of how boundless is the “will to power.” 
A. fixation of a sexual relation, however, must 
have other grounds than chance wishes in the field 
of boundless aspirations. The desire of the boy 
extends to other female persons with whom he is 
brought into contact. ‘The picture if then again 
similar to that of possession “to wish to possess 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 115 


the mother” becomes a sign of his discontent, a 
symbol of his boundless aspirations, of his obsti- 
nacy and his fear of other women. Now in later 
life a “fixation” on the mother from similar con- 
stellations may result, not however, because the 
wish was heretofore libidinous. For it is a mat- 
ter of indifference of what nature the real relation 
to the mother was—the psyche of the neurotic 
will always utilize it in some way for the purpose 
of furnishing him security. 

The motive of the discontent interests us here 
above all. It originates from the feeling of hav- 
ing suffered an injury and it is obvious that the 
child waits fulfillment of every aspiration in his 
“growing up.” According to the psychology of 
the “as if” he may expect his cure from the de- 
velopment of his hair, his teeth, his genital organs. 
His experience with his teeth serves to give him 
the impression that a thing may grow again. 
The tooth-motive plays a frequent role in the 
dreams and phantasies with girls in order to en- 
able them to cling to their hope of becoming a 
man, with boys to give hope to their longing for 
a more complete manhood. If a tooth is pulled, 
a milk tooth, a new, stronger one forms. The 
pulling out of teeth, therefore, symbolizes in the 
dream the wish to become a man. 

Neurotic men like women are full of the feeling 
of having suffered an injury and their whole life 


116 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


is spent in the effort at enlarging their spheres of 
influence. In order to attain this, indeed, in 
order even to assume their attitude toward this 
effort, they are obliged to keep up constantly 
their discontent, so that they will find nourish- 
ment for it and proof of their neglect in every sit- 
uation by examining it, rearranging it or arbitra- 
rily changing it, but always keeping in mind the 
fictitious guiding goal. With great regularity, 
I found in them the apperception according to the 
antithetical scheme “male-female” by means of 
which they sought and classified all their experi- 
ences. ‘This scheme according to which they wish 
to arrange the cosmic picture is usually overlayed 
by an antithetical picture of the large and small 
masculine genitalia. It is a frequent and char- 
acteristic discovery that a finer sensibility devel- 
ops at points of the body which by nature are 
inferior, whose excitability sometimes takes the 
character of pleasurable sensations. I have de- 
scribed this phenomenon in the “Studie uber Or- 
ganmin derwertigheit” (1907, Wien und Berlin) 
and refer them to the compensatory adjustment 
which has come into play during the individual’s 
experience in his struggle for existence where the 
organs or parts of organs in question were men- 
aced. ‘These compensatory, now higher valued 
portions of an inferior organ—inferior after they 
had suffered an injury in their ascendancy—are 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 187 


really in a certain sense protective adjustments, 
although frequently they do not prove of worth. 
Because, however, their technique has become dif- 
ferent and no longer keeps pace with the nearly 
normal organ, the psychic phenomena connected 
with these organs are striking and deviate from 
normality. ‘This is the same albeit more minute 
variation based upon somatic inferiority of which 
I have spoken in the biology, i.e., explanation 
of variation, refinement and decline of an or- 
gan.'? 

In this way, for instance, the sense of taste has 
evolved as a security-serving apparatus, in the 
realm of the nutritive organ, but along with this 
also the pleasure sense apparatus which must now 
guarantee the continuance of nutrition as well as 
the proper choice of food. 

The variation from the type is brought about 
by the “compensation tendency” which is already 
introduced in the germ plasm. 

The environment (in a broader sense the 
milieu) dominates the “germ plasm” and in this 
manner is explained the prompt uniformity of 
reaction, viz. “inferiority plus compensatory se- 


12'Thus the “value of an organ” likewise becomes a symbol in 
life’s current in which are reflected the past, present, future as 
well as the fictive goal in like manner as is the case with the indi- 
vidual’s make-up or with the neurotic symptoms. The idea of 
the “symbolic in a person’s appearance” is not a new one. It 
has been expressed by Porta, Gall and Carus. 


118 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


curity,” through a change in the conditions of life 
in the broadest sense, that is to say, all particular 
members of a single species vary in the same way 
when the same change in their mode of life takes 
place. In regard to human society one must 
keep constantly in mind, more so than in the ani- 
mal and vegetable kingdoms—that the demands 
on the single individual vary to a considerable 
degree one from the other, both quantitatively 
and qualitatively, so that their somatic inferiori- 
ties and the compensatory adjustments resulting 
therefrom differ very widely. And their vari- 
ations would be still more striking were it not for 
the fact that the human psyche has thrust itself 
into the circle of correlations and compensations 
with such preponderance as the principal organ 
of adjustive security.” Now the standard tend- 
encies to security are no longer variations in the 
organs themselves, but psychic peculiarities. 
There always continues to exist a connection 


13 The psychic adjustment of man with its preparations and 
peculiar characteristics simulates so very closely the adjustive 
variations in the animal sphere, that children, neurotics, poets and 
even speech itself utilize this analogy for the purpose of eluci- 
dating by way of comparison a psychic gesture, a trait of char- 
acter, a type of preparedness by means of a representation of an 
animal, as is the case for instance in the designing of escutcheons, 
in poetic similes, in fables and parable. See also Erckmann’s 
Chatrain, the famous Dr. Maltbieu, Goethe’s Reinecke Fox, paint- 
ing and caricatures. 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 119 


which can be sufficiently proved, and we are able 
to infer from somatic variations stigmata and 
signs of degeneration of the same, that there has 
taken place an increased compensatory adjust- 
ment of the brain and more acentuated tendencies 
to obtain security. The nature and tendency of 
all psychic processes are full of the efforts of pre- 
caution and defensive preparations for gaining 
superiority so that one cannot avoid the conclu- 
sion that what we term soul, spirit, reason and 
understanding are for us abstractions of those 
effective guiding lines, to which human beings 
reach out beyond the sphere of bodily sensations, 
striving to overstep their limitations in order to 
gain the mastery of a portion of the world and to 
secure themselves against threatened dangers. 
The imperfection of the independently acting 
organ is thus magically elevated to that security 
which is furnished by knowledge, understanding 
and foresight. 

In the animal kingdom the function performed 
in men by the understanding is performed by a 
finely adjusted technical apparatus. ‘The fine 
scent of the dog becomes superfluous or is brought 
under man’s service, the highly specialized sense 
of taste, which teaches cattle to avoid poisonous 
plants, is supplied in man by the understanding 
eye. 


120 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


But it is the same tendency which continues 
through eternity the struggle of the ancestors to 
facilitate the preservation of life by more finely 
graded, sharply differentiated organs as well as 
by more refined expedients of the psyche. 

And thus it is permitted to us, to regard this 
sort of more sensitive peripheral apparatus, its 
special physiognomy and mimic as a sign of an 
imperfection of some organ, as a trace which be- 
trays a transmitted somatic defect. This is also 
true of the extraordinary development of the. 
organs of taste in man, for the greater sensi- 
bility to stimuli of the lips and mucous membrane 
of the mouth, with which there is usually asso- 
ciated a more exacting state of the gums, ali- 
mentary canal, and stomach. 

Physiognomically the picture of the more in- 
ferior mouth is represented in the form of more 
mobile, thicker or thinner lips, usually associated 
with slight deformities of the lips, of the tongue 
(lingua scrotallis Schmidt), of the gums, with 
which are often associated signs of degeneration 
of these parts, enlarged tonsils or of the whole 
status lymphaticus. At times, it is true, all 
higher development in the sense of a tendency to 
compensation is wanting in the presence of an 
inferiority, even the hyperasthesia. Reftex 
anomalies are quite common, sometimes exagger- 
ation, sometimes diminution of the pharyngeal 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 121 


reflex; along with defects of childhood, one ob- 
serves a greater occupation with the mouth, as 
touching of the mouth, thumb sucking, tenden- 
cies to put everything into the mouth, vomiting. 
Along with this, good digestion is usually present 
in so far as this is not prevented by other coexist- 
ing somatic defects. 

But the evil, the deprivation and the pain 
which from the cradle on are the fate of the child 
with an inferior alimentary tract, awake in him 
at the same time a feeling of inferiority, of having 
suffered an injury and of uncertainty and force 
the constitutionally predisposed child to a resort 
to fictive expedients. The over-strongly devel- 
oped, precocious, egotistic ideal includes within 
itself also fictitious goals of over-gratifications 
which reality can never satisfy. The attention 
of such children is directed after the manner of a 
compulsory idea to all problems of nutrition and 
their sublimation (Nietzsche). The deprivation 
of a delicacy releases in them entirely different 
emotions and actions than we would expect. 
Their sense turns to the kitchen, their play and 
the infantile choice of vocation turn on the phan- 
tasy of procuring nutrition, to be cook or candy- 
maker. The importance of money as a means to 
power dawns upon them earlier and more forci- 
bly, as well as the sense of greed and economy. 
Stereotypies and pedantries in eating are often 


122 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


revealed, courses of action according to a princi- 
ple such as the best is to be put into the mouth 
first or last, the impatient preferring the first 
practice, the cautious and avaricious the latter. 
Idiosyncrasies against certain foods, refusal of 
food, hasty swallowing, are often adhered to as 
traits of obstinacy and show the application of 
the problem of nutrition as an aggression against 
the parents. Aside from the organic diseases of 
Jater life which go with an inferior alimentary 
apparatus, and among which I have emphasized 
ulcer of the stomach, appendicitis, cancer, dia- 
betes, liver and gall bladder disease, there is mani- 
fested in the neurosis a stronger participation and 
frequent employment of functional disturbances 
of the digestive tract. Its intimate relation to 
the psyche is reflected in many neurotic and psy- 
chotic symptoms. I believe I am on the track of 
a special expedient of this sort, without being 
able to present conclusive facts. A number of 
neurotic symptoms, such as erythrophobia, neu- 
rotic obstipation and colic, asthma, probably also 
vertigo, vomiting, headache, and migraine stand 
in some sort of relation, which is as yet not en- 
tirely clear to me, with a voluntary but uncon- 
sciously codperating activity of anus-contraction 
(“cramp” of the other authors) (spasms of sig- 
moid flexure, Holzknecht, Singer) and that of 
abdominal pressure, symbolic acts which are ac- 


THE ACCENTUATED FICTION 123 


complished through the domination of the reén- 
forced fiction. 

Acquisitiveness and greed for gold and power 
I found strikingly in the foreground and as essen- 
tial factors in the egotistic ideal of these indi- 
viduals. 


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CHAPTER I 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, CRUELTY, THE 
DEROGATORY CRITIQUE OF THE NEUROTIC, 
NEUROTIC APPERCEPTION, SENILE NEUROSES, 
CHANGES IN THE FORM AND INTENSITY OF 
THE FICTION. SOMATIC JARGON (ORGAN- 
JARGON ) 


I wıst to speak first of those traits of charac- 
ter which may be demonstrated with a certain 
regularity in all neurotics, and which reach ex- 
pression in the patient’s striving with great 
eagerness, directly or circuitously, consciously or 
unconsciously, by means of purposive thinking 
and acting, or through an especial arrangement 
of symptoms, towards greater possession, to- 
wards a heightening of his power and influence, 
towards a degradation and belittling of others. 
All these forms of self-interest are most often 
found to coexist, and it is only after a better 
insight that one recognizes the mighty prepon- 
derance of those evasions by means of which the 
patient deceives himself and his environment. 
He even deceives also science. 


While playing, for instance, the role of unsel- 
127 


128 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


fishness, one finds again and again in his attacks, 
in his neurosis, moreover in the end result gained 
by means of the latter, that exaggerated eager- 
ness of which we have spoken in the beginning :— 
He thus arouses the impression of a double-ego, 
of one suffering from a splitting of consciousness, 
and whereas a fictitious goal permits him to ob- 
serve secretly more rigidly than does the normal 
person the scheme of avarice, envy, desire for 
mastery, malice, disputatiousness, and desire to 
please (coquetry), he is compelled in the open 
(perhaps also on account of his desire to please) 
to play the role of the benefactor and patron, of 
the pacifier and unselfish saint. Not that this 
play is usually without disastrous results, some- 
what like Gregor Werles’ truth—fanaticism in 
Ibsen’s “Wild Duck.” One cannot estimate 
strongly enough the neurotic’s mania to desire 
possession of everything, his eagerness to wish to 
be the first one—cannot be over-stated—even 
though the obvious traits of character furnish the 
most contradictory picture. What really drives 
the patient onward is the overweening desire for 
absolute power; and inasmuch as his ego-con- 
sciousness takes offense at many of his means— 
inasmuch as the power of others may prevent his 
triumph, he conceals the hindering traits of char- 
acter from himself and others, and having full in- 
sight into his hostile impulses and their unpopu- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 129 


larity, he allows himself to be guided in the open 
in his conscious activities by the ideal of virtue. 
Notwithstanding this, however, his heightened 
aggressive tendency betrays itself—namely in the 
dreams in uncontrolled acts, in his attitude, 
mimicry and gesture—and in that psychic being 
(“Geschehen”) the expression for which is the 
neurosis. 

Concerning the question of transmissibility of 
such characteristics, yes, also their antagonistic 
arrangement, there as a rule develops that they 
have been acquired as secondary guiding princi- 
ples after the pattern of the father, the mother, 
or representative persons and are in nowise in- 
herited. The neurotic psyche finds it in its own 
or in some representative material, for the pur- 
pose of which the “double play”—the cleft con- 
sciousness of society—is utilized in many cases. 
It is then, however, the device of the neurosis, to 
conceal and change those hostile aggressive traits 
which are frequently unsuitable for the fictitious 
purpose of obtaining a heightening of the ego- 
consciousness—and to obtain the latter goal 
through a more intensive utilization of artifices— 
often by means of contrasting characteristics and 
neurotic symptoms. One readily becomes con- 
vinced that the generosity of such patients obeys 
the same goal of the “will to power” which the 
patient strives to approach also through the 


130 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


heightening of his aggressive tendency, his avarice 
and thriftiness. 

One of my patients who came under my obser- 
vation on account of stammering and depressive 
states, permitted to appear in his environment a 
detection only of his generosity. One day he 
made a voluntary bequest to a certain institute, 
and told me this story with an apparently directly 
associated statement that he felt unusually de- 
pressed that day. Along with this his stammer- 
ing likewise became more pronounced. ‘The ex- 
aggerated state of his neurosis showed itself to be 
a result of his generosity as result of which he 
feels himself degraded and one is justified in ex- 
pecting a revelation of the real working of this 
individual in further acts, thoughts and dreams 
as running with the developing neurotic symp- 
toms—not because he has repressed his avari- 
ciousness or a corresponding sexual impulse—but 
because he has deviated too far from his goal— 
namely, to increase his possessions. He must 
therefore do something which will bring him back 
to it. He tells me further, “It was already far 
after the dinner hour. I felt very hungry, and 
besides a friend awaited me in a restaurant where 
we were to dine together. I had to walk there- 
fore the (long) distance to that place. My 
friend still waited. After dinner I felt somewhat 
better.” This means that he began at once to 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 181 


save again and made the journey on foot, not- 
withstanding hunger, depression and rendezvous. 
Incidentally, he was able to let the friend wait, 
which is with many neurotics the concealed mode 
of asserting their desire for dominancy. 

The very first manifestation, actions and com- 
munications of the patient in the presence of the 
physician, frequently contain the most important 
of the disease mechanism and character develop- 
ment. This is so because the patient is as yet not 
in possession of cautiousness in the presence of 
the physician. As the above quoted patient in- 
troduced himself to me, he told me casually, that 
his father was not well to do, and that he was 
unable to make great sacrifices for the treatment. 
After a certain time, there came of necessity to 
light that he deceived me in this respect in order 
to obtain a smaller charge. He showed himself 
to be avaricious also in many other respects, but 
at the same time he endeavored to deceive both 
himself and others in this respect. Both of these 
traits were also possessed by the father, and our 
patie_t was taught stinginess by the latter with 
special stress. He was often told “money is 
might, for money everything can be had.” Thus 
it could not be avoided that our patient, who was 
already in childhood very ambitious and tyranni- 
cal, having later fallen into an uncertain situa- 
tion and believing that he could not reach the pa- 


132 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ternal standard, through direct means, took 
refuge under the pressure of his ambitiousness, in 
the device to convince the father of his utter help- 
lessness and of the other failures of his educa- 
tional plans, by retaining this childhood defect, 
stammering. Through his stammering, he 
spoiled his father’s play—because he was not able 
to be the first one, because he was not able to 
surpass the latter. 

Our culture, however, agrees with those chil- 
dren who see in the amassing of fortune the road 
to power. Similarly led on, this “will to power” 
assumed the external form of stinginess and 
avarice in so far as he further developed these 
tendencies. It was only the contradiction be- 
tween a vulgar avariciousness and the ego-ideal 
which forced him to a concealment of the impulse 
to avarice by means of which he wished to domi- 
nate his father, and forced him to the substitution 
of the stammering. In the further course of the 
analysis the origin of his desire for possession 
became evident. He suffered practically con- 
stantly in his infancy from stomach and intestinal 
disorders, which were the expression of a heredi- 
tary inferiority of the gastro-intestinal tract. In 
the family, stomach and intestinal disorders 
played an important role. ‘The patient recalled 
very distinctly how he frequently had to deny 
himself appetizing food in spite of hunger and 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 183 


desire, whereas his parents and brothers and sis- 
ters consumed them with pleasure. Whenever 
he could he gathered foods, bonbons and fruits to 
be feasted upon later. In this tendency to 
gather, we already see the influence of the devel- 
oping craving for security, which is constantly 
endeavoring to adjust in some way or other the 
feeling of degradation. 

How far, however, this may reach may be 
shown by a constructed example which I am able 
to verify with analogies from our case. The 
eagerness for power, and through it for posses- 
sion may be stirred up by the feeling of inferior- 
ity to such a point that one finds it at phases of 
the psychic development when one would least 
expect it. 

A small patient of this sort will at first, it is 
true, only desire to have the apple which is for- 
bidden him, in seeing his father and brother eat- 
ing the same. Envy will begin to stir itself, and 
after a brief period such a child may have reached 
the stage in his deliberateness and contemplation 
when out of the striving for equality he will at- 
tempt to prevent others from having anything 
before he has it. It will soon have reached so far 
in the elaboration of this albeit only slightly im- 
portant idea, as to have at his disposal all sorts 
of preparations and facilities, it will, especially 
in the presence of an originally inferior muscular 


134 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


system, train itself for the whole year by climbing 
and jumping in order to be able to climb a tree 
as a master in the fall. The human psyche is not 
able to account always for fictitious goals, and 
thus the child may apparently free himself from 
his goal, employ his dexterity in sports and gym- 
nastics in the service of other tendencies, which 
serve in a different manner his ego-consciousness 
somewhat like our modern States conduct our 
war preparations without even knowing the fu- 
ture enemy. 

The father of our patient may have easily been 
taken by the boy as an incidental example because 
he excelled his environment in greatness, power, 
wealth and social standing. If the boy is to 
emerge out of his insecurity into which he has 
been plunged by his constitutional inferiority he 
must arrange his preparations for life in accord- 
ance with a set point of view as after a plan (blue 
print). A marked exhibition of the guiding 
principle toward the paternal ideal ( Vaterideal) 
is in itself quite a neurotic trait, because in it we 
may comprehend the entire misery of the child 
who endeavors to emerge from his insecurity. 
The craving for security (Sicherungstendenz) 
of the neurosis leads the patient in this way out 
of the sphere of his own power and forces him 
into a path which leads away from reality, first 
because he takes for his object his fiction to be 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 135 


equal to his father or even to excel him and is 
therefore forced to formulate, arrange and in- 
fluence his apperception of life under its compul- 
sion, and second because one can never succeed 
in carrying out such a fiction in real life except 
in a psychosis. 

In this way, there develops in the psyche of the 
child an intensive searching, weighing, and meas- 
uring tendency of which I shall have to say some- 
thing more. ‘That which is according to my ex- 
perience primarily responsible for the too rigid 
assumption of the paternal guiding principles, 
may be discovered in an investigation into the 
sexual roles. The neurotically predisposed child, 
or as I may say, the child laboring under the pres- 
sure of a feeling of inferiority, desires to become 
a man, as soon as the neurosis develops, to be a 
man. In both instances he can only conduct him- 
self in such a manner as if he were a man or shall 
become one. The exaggerated craving for secur- 
ity drives also in this instance the attitude of the 
developing neurotic into the ban of the fiction, 
so that in some instances even conscious simula- 
tion may come into play, and a girl for mstance 
in order to escape a feeling of inferiority may 
in the beginning borrow in conscious imitation 
masculine gestures of her father. There is no 
reason for the assumption that because of this she 
must be in love with her father. ‘The mere over- 


136 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


valuation of the masculine principle suffices for 
this, may nevertheless at times be taken as in- 
fatuation by the girl herself as well as by her en- 
vironment, should the preparations for the future 
playfully demand a hinting of love or a marriage. 
In our case the guiding line to the compensatory 
ego-ideal, transformed itself through a change 
of form and content into a craving to excel the 
father in wealth, esteem, and along with this in 
manliness. The inquiry into his own sexual role, 
sets in intensively and typically as sexual curi- 
osity, whereby the patient in his feeling of in- 
feriority, apperceives the smallness of his infantile 
genitals as compared with the largeness of the 
paternal ones, as a bitter setback, as a want of 
masculinity. His ambitiousness which shall en- 
able him to rise out of his state of inferiority, 
compelled him to a heightening of his sense of 
shame, in order that his genitals may not be seen 
in the event of an exposure (in case he is nude). 
To this may be added that he was of Jewish 
descent. He had heard certain things about cir- 
cumcision and harbored the idea that he was also 
(Verkürzt) belittled through the operation. 
His masculine protest drove him to a degradation 
of woman, as if he had to give proof to his superi- 
ority in this wise, and came into the most abomi- 
nable relationship with his mother. 

But also with respect to his father, whose pref- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 187 


erence for himself he gained through diplomatic 
adjustment, he harbored hostile thoughts which 
became especially prominent when the father 
over-emphasized his own superiority to do which 
he had a marked inclination. In this chaos of 
feelings the patient sought orientation, and found 
it only in the thought to become superior to his 
father, to become more manly than he. 

He had, too, as often happens in such cases, 
undertaken attempts at enlarging his genitals or 
bringing about erection. This route which leads 
to sexual precocity and masturbation, was soon 
abandoned by him, because his father warned him 
against it on numerous occasions. ‘Thus there 
remained as a substitution for his masculine pro- 
test, only efforts to become richer, more honored 
and wiser than his father, and to degrade his en- 
vironment. 

His father placed great hopes in the patient’s 
oratorical talents, which had shown themselves al- 
ready in childhood, did not allow himself to be de- 
ceived by the mild stammering of the boy, and 
hoped he would make a law career. In this re- 
spect the patient was able to strike at the father’s 
most vulnerable point, and thus he sank into a 
more pronounced stammering, a neurotic mani- 
festation of the insurance against the superiority 
of the father, a manifestation whose inception 
was given him by a stammering home teacher. 


138 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


In the course of time, this symptom gained many 
other uses, for example, the one that through his 
stammering he always gained time in which to 
weigh his words, to avoid demands of the family, 
to utilize the confession of others as well as that 
prejudice because of which, only little was ex- 
pected of him, which he then managed to fulfill 
easily. It is interesting that his quite apparent 
stammering was no obstacle to his courtship, that 
it even expedited matters, a fact which becomes 
quite comprehensible from our standpoint, ac- 
cording to which we assume the existence of a 
quite prevalent type of girl which cannot omit 
from the conditions of their love that the man of 
their choice must be beneath them, so that they 
may with certainty rule over him. Especially 
hostile feelings against his parents, brothers and 
sisters and the servants he put a stop to, through 
the development of a new guiding principle which 
was to make of him a benevolent man. This new 
evolution took place under a nightly confession 
through which he reproached himself for his wick- 
edness and arranged qualms of conscience. His 
growing knowledge thus showed him the way, 
through a cultural subterfuge to a heightening of 
his ego-consciousness. 

The want of a direct aggressiveness showed it- 
self in thoughts and phantasies, albeit also in his 
good progress at school, so that he was victorious 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 139 


over all his classmates. A growing tendency to- 
wards sarcasm and exasperation of others was at 
this time the only manifest expression of his for- 
mer often violent aggressiveness which gained for 
him the nickname of “blood-leech.” His comba- 
tive attitude played an important röle in the cause 
of Judaism, which was reflected in an act of com- 
pulsion at the age of twelve. Whenever he en- 
tered a swimming pool he had to cover his geni- 
tals with his hands and immediately submerge his 
head under the water, where he kept it until he 
counted 49, so that he often came to the surface 
gasping for air and exhausted. The analysis re- 
vealed the mental content to be a striving of his 
phantasy to bring about an equality of genitalia. 
The forty-ninth year is, according to the old Jew- 
ish laws, with which he had become acquainted 
shortly before, the year of the jubilee, in which 
all acres were again made equal. Ideas of this 
sort, and the simultaneous concealment of the 
genitalia showed the way to the interpretation. 
One may almost draw the conclusion that also his 
stammering was intended to make him quits with 
a superiority of his father, of all people, inasmuch 
as his stuttering was an obstacle to them, was even 
painful to them. 

His avarice, his stinginess, were accordingly 
active in the same direction, namely, to clear the 
field of superiorities of others, to insure him 


140 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


against further degradation and _ belittling 
through poverty, thus he was compelled markedly 
to expand these secondary directions and to for- 
mulate and evaluate his experiences according to 
them in order to reach the heightening of his ego- 
consciousness, his masculine protest. It was 
only under such circumstances where through 
revelation of these traits of character a lowering 
of his ego might arise that he suppressed their 
apparent activity. 

It were an absurdity to wish to assume a moral 
standpoint in a medico-psychological question, to 
consider people like the above as morally inferior. 
Those who have an inclination in this direction I 
wish to remind of the very strong, compensatory 
traits of character, of a worthy nature, for the 
rest I wish to remind them of Rochefoucauld’s 
wise sentence—viz: “I have never investigated 
the soul of a wicked man, but I once became ac- 
quainted with the soul of a good man: I was 
shocked.” 

In another case, the nature of the avarice 
showed itself not as a safety device for the com- 
pensation of a feeling of degradation, but above 
all as an artifice in the service of the craving for 
security. A forty-five year old patient who suf- 
fered throughout life from psychic impotency, 
and was pursued by suicidal ideas, showed an es- 
pecially marked tendency to degrade others. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 141 


We know this trait of character from the de- 
scription of the previous case where it served as 
it always does to do away with one’s own feeling 
of inferiority. With this tendency there is 
usually associated exaggerated mistrust and 
envy, which have for their object as neurotic- 
psychic dexterities, the falsification of the search 
and valuation of experiences. A tendency, too, 
to cause others bodily and psychic pain, will like- 
wise know how to assert itself in an accentuated 
manner. The abstract, guiding point of view of 
the patient, to assure his dominating position, to 
be above, appeared to be obviously threatened, 
and compelled a strengthening of fictitious guid- 
ing principles. Reminiscences out of his infan- 
tile period were utilized in the neurosis, as result 
of which he came near being the victim of a homo- 
sexualist. He was raised as an only boy among 
his sisters, a situation which, according to my ex- 
perience, frequently narrows the understanding 
of one’s own sexual role. 

Of importance was his attitude toward his 
father, because it likewise drove him to strength- 
ened security devices. The father, namely, was 
brutal, egotistical, tyrannical, so that it was difk: 
cult for the boy to assert his own value in his 
presence. Several love adventures had thrown 
the father into quite difficult situations which our 
patient utilized as mementoes in his developed 


142 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


psychosis. This mistrust was directed against 
all women. ‘Throughout life he remained ready 
to make sacrifices for his sisters, but he had al- 
ready apperceived this fact with an unusual 
amount of feeling, and readily developed from 
this trains of thought which were to show how 
readily he gave in.to women. Incidentally, he 
was able to advance quite considerably in this 
direction in order to be able to emphasize sharply 
this impression for himself. It was then that he 
was prepared to withdraw himself from women. 

He transformed into a sexual image, feelings 
of inferiority which were present in his childhood. 
The reason for his unmanly bearing—for the 
homosexualist wanted to take him for a girl—he 
sought for and found in an incidental Cryptor- 
chism caused by a patent canal. At the age of 
eight he watched a boy in the act of masturba- 
tion. Hic puer ei semen ejacularit in os—which 
he looked upon as a further sign of his feminine 
role. So long as he took his father as his guiding 
principle, he exhibited the ordinary dexterities 
intended to make him equal to his father. He 
secretly consumed his father’s whiskey, en- 
deavored to bring his mother over to his side, and 
already early in life had chosen his father’s trade, 
by means of which he was also able to satisfy his 
sadistic tendencies which were excited by his feel- 
ing of inferiority and his striving toward the pa- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 143 


ternal guiding line—to choose the trade of a 
butcher. He was also fond of bringing his vul- 
gar tendencies into execution upon girls and 
women—he was in the habit of biting them, beat- 
ing them, and took part one time in a sexual as- 
sault, when he carried out coitus per anum in 
order to avoid a possibility of alimony. His 
experience, however, which showed him in the 
complete brutal character of his father, drove 
him, because of the threatening of a lawsuit, and 
the degradation associated with it, to a neurotic 
subterfuge. He utilized his already accentuated 
mistrust of women for the purpose of torturing 
them with fits of jealousy, of bringing them en- 
tirely under his influence and insure in this man- 
ner the appearance of dominancy. 

His ejaculatio precox and the associated im- 
potency served his need for security in the same 
manner as did his animosity towards women. 
He showed preference for the seduction of mar- 
ried women in order to cause them disappoint- 
ments through his impotency, at the same time, 
however, to gain in a sportive manner a substan- 
tiation of his belief that all women were bad. 
Also in his compulsory ideas this tendency to 
cause pain manifested itself. Thus even during 
his treatment he experienced sudden impulsions 
to bite and beat a language teacher while taking 
a lesson from her, because he developed ideas that 


144 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


she had a lover whom she preferred to the patient. 
This sadistic reaction to a feeling of subordinacy, 
as a masculine protest against a feeling of being 
unmanly, effeminate, had its origin in childhood 
and runs through his entire neurosis. It was not 
difficult to prove, that his impotency similarly 
obeyed the goal to find a means whereby to es- 
cape the call of love, the subordination to a wife, 
a tendency, however, which found its contmu- 
ation in a further degradation of women. 

As he saw no prospect of dominating his 
teacher, he immediately left her, because he knew 
that she was dependent upon giving him lessons. 
Before, however, having done this he undertook 
a critical estimation of the expense of taking les- 
sons, found them beyond his means which could 
be readily seen to be a false purposive valuation 
of the very well-to-do individual. In the same 
manner he made use of the occasionally recurring 
reminiscences of incestuous thoughts, in order to 
become apprehensively conscious of his inferior- 
ity, of his criminal tendencies as soon as women 
came into play. Thus he established his base of 
operation, by means of which he must insure him- 
self against the feminine gender, as a result of 
which he seemed to be assured of lasting superior- 
ity throughout life. 

The essence of his compulsion towards an in- 
surance against women lay in the fear that he 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 145 


might experience in marriage or love disappoint- 
ment which he might attribute to his unmanli- 
ness. Inasmuch as he sought his remote goal in 
the proof of his might he was bound to become 
inclined toward caution and neurotic subter- 
fuges. In this patient also there were present 
early gastro-intestinal disturbances, and as a 
peripheral sign of inferiority the fatal inguinal 
hernia. In his sort of love-activity, exaggerated 
avarice lent itself as the most useful means for 
an insurance against a too far-reaching surren- 
der. In order, however, that this avarice may be 
of use, it must embrace the whole sphere of his 
life’s relations and must be omnipresent. It 
must in turn be supported, it must be assisted by 
all sorts of by-traits. This took place among 
other things in the arrangement of compulsory 
ideas. Whenever he used an automobile, the 
thought that a collision might take place came to 
his mind. A further analysis of this compulsory 
idea revealed that he was farthest away from a 
belief in such an eventuality but that he always 
avoided all expensive means of travel. Yes, 
even when he used the tram cars for an extended 
trip, the thought occurred to him, upon reach- 
ing the point where the cheap fare terminated 
and the more expensive one began, that a col- 
lision might take place, or that the bridge which 
had to be crossed might collapse, so that he would 


146 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


always pay the cheaper fare, save a few pennies 
and cover the rest of the distance on foot. He 
was on the road where he felt bitterly every ex- 
penditure. 

Thus it also came to pass that he sought to 
degrade man, in order to gain a uniformity of 
behavior. ‘This already became distinctly mani- 
fest in the hunt after married women, and the 
dismay and disappointment of the seduced women 
as well as the abusive language which he used to- 
ward them afterward pleased him no less than 
the satisfaction of once again having shown him- 
self to be the stronger. This was in line with 
the content of his life, with the change of form 
in which his original fiction to be the manliest 
came closest to realization. 

Only the fear of women which synchronously 
with the realization of his own femininity origi- 
nally led him to his exaggerated masculine pro- 
test, found itself again in the unduly accentu- 
ated insurance against the domination of women 
and allowed him to strengthen beyond measure 
like a safety-dam his mistrust and avarice, both 
of which offered good arguments. Swept away 
by this craving for security, he furthermore at- 
tached to it his psychic impotency, with which he 
became acquainted during his first attempts at 
coitus. A servant girl whom he wanted to se- 
duce as a youngster, offered resistance and es- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 147 


caped him by tightening her limbs. He was at 
that time inexperienced and considered himself 
impotent. Later, as he became more experi- 
enced in these matters, he felt his inexperience 
in such a way, as if woman were an insoluble 
puzzle to him. In the original impotency, how- 
ever, as well as in his helplessness in the presence 
of woman, he found the neurotic subterfuges by 
means of which to escape a depreciatory defeat, 
a decision adverse to his masculinity. The com- 
paring of himself with other men set in vehe- 
mently now. He would surprise himself for in- 
stance, when sitting at the table in company, in 
a psychic situation, where before any one even 
had spoken a word, he was already planning a 
repartee, already figuring how he might prove the 
speaker wrong, no matter whether he was speak- 
ing of a book or a theatrical performance, or 
society or place, his derogatory criticism always 
pushed itself to the front in a most pronounced 
form. And so it was to be expected that after 
a brief introductory period his traits of mistrust, 
avarice, and depreciation of others would become 
evident every time he underwent medical treat- 
ment, often quite artfully linked one with the 
other. ‘This phenomenon, not at all in the Freud- 
ian sense of a transference, but because his rigidly 
fixed psychic gesture, his attitude of attack, his 
tendency to degrade others, actually did, and 


148 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


upon closer acquaintance, was obliged to come to 
the surface. To this was added another accentu- 
ating moment. His object when seeking the ad- 
vice of a physician, could not have been simply 
to become rid of his impotency because in such an 
event, he would have been cast into the chaos of 
his apprehensions. He was much more anxious 
to find proof of his incurability, or to find means 
of ridding himself of his impotency without the 
fear of a defeat. In order to bring about the 
first, a depreciation of the physician’s ability was 
a preliminary condition. ‘The proper means of 
ridding himself of his impotency however, he 
could only find after following up his fear of . 
women to its source, to the feeling of his unmanli- 
ness, in which his feeling of inferiority became 
concrete. One of his dreams which occurred at 
the period preceding the termination of the treat- 
ment showed this state of affairs very distinctly. 

I must first of all briefly state that I make use 
of certain important parts of the Breuer-Freud 
technique of dream interpretation, but that I see 
in the dream an abstracting, simplifying en- 
deavor to find, by means of a premeditation and 
testing of difficulties carried on in accordance 
with the patient’s own peculiar scheme—a pro- 
tective way for the ego-consciousness out of a sit- 
uation which threatens a defeat. 

One will therefore always discover in the 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 149 


dream, that significant scheme of the antithetical 
mode of apperception: “masculine-feminine,” 
“above—beneath” as existing originally in every- 
body, but especially marked in the neurotic. 
The various notions and recollections which come 
to the surface in the dream, must be brought 
within this scheme before they can be of any aid 
in the interpretation of same, whose object it is 
not—or at least not principally—the fulfillment 
of infantile wishes but rather to accompany those 
introductory endeavors, to bring about a balance 
in favor of the ego-consciousness, through balanc- 
ing the patient’s debit-credit account in a pecu- 
liarly neurotic manner. His dream was as fol- 
lows: 

“I dealt in second-hand goods in Vienna, or in 
Germany, or in France. I had to buy, however, 
new goods and wash them, because this would 
then be cheaper. Then they were again old 
(second-hand) goods.” 

The new goods meant new potent genitalia in 
contrast to the “(second-hand) old goods,” his 
impotency—which as yet nobody had cured. 
Here the idea of a new life, of a possibility of at- 
taining potency, shines through. The words, 
“because they would be cheaper” correspond to 
the previously elucidated ideas, his fear of money 
expenditures in case he does not become potent. 
This idea, however, can only be accepted under 


150 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


one condition, to wit—if the patient is saturated 
with the conviction that he is boundless in his 
love-impulse, that he knows no limits and sense- 
lessly hunts after women. This conviction he 
purposely takes for himself out of his childhood 
reminiscences, out of his period of puberty and 
adolescence. In doing so he also assists in the 
shaping of his infantile incest-stirrings should 
these serve his purpose in a form, as if he had 
coveted his mother or sisters with a sexual object. 
This means that he works, with a fiction which 
arose from the assumed goal, through gaining 
security for himself, similarly as Sophocles de- 
veloped and shaped the (Edipus legend in order 
to stabilize the holy commands of the gods. Our 
patient became a willing victim of his limited un- 
derstanding of dialectic and of the antithetical 
manner of primitive thinking. ‘The guiding idea 
of his ego-ideal “I must not covet blood rela- 
tions,’ embraces dialectically the antithetical 
thought of an incestuous possibility. Inasmuch 
as the neurotic desires to insure himself, he clings 
to this antithetical thought, plays with it, empha- 
sizes it and utilizes it in the neurosis in the same 
way as all other frightening reminiscences which 
appear to him to be useful for his security. In 
the life of our patient, and in the lives of all neu- 
rotics, there are very many more experiences, 
which might have been able to carry with them 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 151 


the conviction that they were free from incestu- 
ous stimuli, that they were always especially tem- 
perate, careful and timorous. 

Inasmuch, however, as he desires to reassure 
himself, his neurotic and falsifying mode of ap- 
perception push these traits of character pur- 
posely aside. He has many more impressions to 
that effect, that he does not covet his mother and 
sister, but he is, however, unable to utilize them in 
the service of his craving for security. ‘Thus 
there remains for them only a memory rest of a 
playful preparatory venture, and because this 
may serve as a warning to him, he makes of it a 
bugbear, with which to frighten himself. Ex- 
actly in the same manner, develop neurotic 
anxiety, fear of places, hypochondriasis, pes- 
simism and constant doubting, inasmuch as these 
patients only avail themselves of those impres- 
sions and experiences which serve the purpose of 
bringing about security, which strengthens their 
affective state while they depreciate all others 
especially those of an antithetical nature. The 
sophist’s ability “in utram-que partem dicere” of 
everything is also possessed by the neurotic as 
well as by the psychotic, and they utilize it as 
they need it. 

The thoroughly polished, purposefully 
strengthened dexterities of neurotics, and the 
neurotic traits of character which go with them 


152 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


are impossible for the fact that every new situa- 
tion brings about havoc. (Lombroso’s misoneis- 
mus.) More than anything else, our patient 
feared the, to him unknown, situation of sexual 
gratification and successful coitus, because in 
presentiments of this situation, he gave himself 
for reasons of safety the role of the underling 
(unterliegenden). Now this fear, which is ap- 
perceived as a fear of impotency, furnishes a fur- 
ther security against the possibility of being re- 
strained, restricted in freedom or deceived by his 
wife, against a possibility of not being equal to 
her, against a role which is contrary to his mas- 
culine ideal, and which he therefore evaluates as 
effeminate. 

Out of the harmless, ubiquitous traits of sel- 
fishness, avarice and stinginess, he puts together 
a far-reaching, apparently imminent, but in real- 
ity fictitious guiding principle of “avarice,” be- 
cause, the retention of this appears to him to be 
lost. Should he become endowed, as was the 
case in the dream with that which he had desired 
already in childhood, namely, new genitals, a 
healthy potency, then he must defend himself 
against it. He takes hold then of a means, with 
which he has been long acquainted, which has 
often been highly recommended to him, which 
after all enfeebles his erections instead of 
strengthening them,—he turns to cold washes. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 153 


This according to his experiences, inadequate 
remedy, he considers equal to my treatment. 
The remedy shall bring about the opposite to 
what it is aimed to do, and this physician shall 
have just as little success as the former ones. 
Thus the dream shows him the way out of the 
situation, it tells him how to safeguard himself 
against the treatment and thus get the upper 
hand of the physician. “Then they are second- 
hand goods again.” 

In other cases of psychic impotency a cure 
readily results, and as we know, as result of the 
most diverse kinds of remedies. Often it con- 
cerns neurotic patients who by the mere fact of 
going to consult a physician give one to under- 
stand that they would be inclined to give up this 
form of security. In that case all manner of 
medication, cold douches, electricity, hydrother- 
apy, and especially every form of suggestion, 
even the one resulting from an incomplete analy- 
sis are of value, occasionally the authoritative 
command of the physician suffices to bring about 
definite consequences. In severe cases, it is 
necessary to bring about a transformation of the 
all too absorbing, concentrated psyche upon the 
idea of security. 


Age often intensely stimulates envy and 
avarice. Psychologically this is not difficult to 


154 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


understand. No matter how beautifully poets 
and philosophers endeavor to picture age, it is 
nevertheless only given to the select souls, to 
maintain their equilibrium, when they see loom- 
ing up in the distance the gate which leads to 
death. Then again the denials and restrictions, 
which the senium naturally carries with it, and 
the perceptible dominancy of the younger folks, 
of one’s own relations, which often furnish the 
occasion, quite innocently—or apparently so— 
for a degradation of old people—will almost al- 
ways lead to a depression of the ego-conscious- 
ness. The sunshiny preparedness as it is re- 
freshingly expressed in Goethe’s “Father Time” 
is a quite unattainable illusion for most people, 
and fortunate indeed may be considered those 
who survive their best time of life without a se- 
vere depression of the spirits. 

According to our thesis, it must naturally fol- 
low that the period of aging—brings forth simi- 
larly to a severe setback, a feeling of inferiority. 
Especially affected by this will be all those who 
are neurotically predisposed. At times it is age, 
in women, the climacteric, feelings of insuffi- 
ciency of a psychic or physical nature, indica- 
tions of impotency, a breaking up of the family, 
marriage of a son or daughter, as well as financial 
losses, the loss of a position or post of honor 
which first causes the breakdown. In most in- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 155 


stances one may already find in the previous his- 
tory indications of actual attacks of a neurotic 
character. 

Age with its losses has the same effect as other 
degradations of the ego-consciousness. The ag- 
gressive tendency seeks other means whereby an 
adjustment may be brought about, other means 
which unfortunately are not easily to be had in 
these cases. Renunciation would come easier, if 
along with the sinking of bodily and mental 
power there would also take place a narrowing of 
the emotional life. This seldom happens, and in 
order to find a substitute for the loss, the aggres- 
sive tendency which has been stimulated by the 
insecurity—again whips up all stimuli of desire. 
The universal decree frequently stands all too 
firm against all these endeavors. The bearing, 
the life, the desires, the dress, the work and ac- 
complishments of aging people are subject to 
criticism in a great measure. ‘Those who are 
predisposed to a neurosis will readily take this 
criticism as a barricade—and will already shrink 
from these situations which still offer possibility 
of gratification. Such an individual will force 
himself into submission, will want to annihilate 
his feelings and desires, without being able to 
set himself to rights with them. Yes, still more 
intensely will these flare up when a renunciation 
without adjustment is demanded. 


156 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


~ Thus it happens that the active hostile traits of 
character develop, that envy, ill-will, avarice, the 
craving for dominancy, sadistic impulses of all 
sorts, experience accentuations, and never satis- 
fied, bring about a restlessness which unremit- 
tingly strives for remedies, substitutions, securi- 
ties, “Where you are not—there is happiness” 
because the real position of aging people is seri- 
ously endangered in our state of society, inas- 
much as it is the productive value, which is almost 
exclusively the test of the worth of the personal- 
ity. ‘The neurotic’s sustenance (Brod) on the 
other hand is the appearance of power, prestige, 
even suicide has already come within our experi- 
ence as the last expression of masculine protest. 

The advent of senility has even a stronger ef- 
fect upon women than upon men. Even the 
significance of the climacteric is usually phantas- 
tically exaggerated. Youth and beauty meant 
power for woman, and more so than for man. 
Her charms were able to give her dominancy, vic- 
tories and triumphs, for which the neurotic greed- 
iness constantly longs. 

Age to them is like a stain. Besides their value 
sinks more decidedly than is the case with the 
aging man, and as far as it concerns aging 
woman, prevailing psychology may be desig- 
nated point blank as actually hostile. 

This deplorable feature has its origin in the 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 157 


well known tendency of man to depreciate 
woman, coupled with the psychic defeat which 
they experience from our social life, a neurotic 
germ which manifests itself, implacably and in- 
eradicably even unto the grave. Consciously or 
unconsciously, often unavoidably from the na- 
ture of things, this derogatory tendency has its in- 
jurious effect upon the ego-consciousness of these 
aging women, who after all have a right to live. 
Children’s love and respect for the aged as aids 
and guiding points of view in man’s relations 
with his fellow men, furnish only the very mi- 
nutest relief and can never suffice to gratify the 
stimulated desires of people whose powers are 
waning. It is then that the neurotic bent sets in 
for the purpose of strengthening the guiding 
principle. “I am deprimed—lI had too little out 
of life—I will realize nothing more,” this one 
regularly hears in the complaints of aging neu- 
rotics, and they accentuate this manner of view- 
ing life to such an extent, that they suspiciously 
and distrustfully sink into a repulsive egoism, 
the like of which they had never before expe- 
rienced so vividly. Through this, however, the 
vacillations and doubts become stabilized. 

“Act as though you were still obliged to attain 
worth,” thus approximately rings a newly con- 
structed guiding principle, and along with this 
the nerotic’s sharpening of avarice becomes more 


158 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


acute, the avaricious, envious, domineering im- 
pulses come violently to the foreground, almost, 
however, restrained by the previously mentioned 
guiding principles in accordance with which these 
patients shrink with apprehension from every 
desire and beginning. ‘Thus there lie unmistak- 
ably under cover, separated with difficulty from 
consciousness, those impulses which lastingly 
support dissatisfaction, impatience, mistrust, and 
uninterruptedly direct the attention of the unat- 
tained and often unattainable. In the last in- 
stance, to the success of which the marked adap- 
tability of the sexual symbols contributes in a 
way, but furthermore also the fact that a proof of 
a lack of sexual gratification is readily to be had 
by every one, it therefore happens, that all desire 
becomes sexualized. It is readily understood 
that these people apperceive on a sexual basis. 
But one must avoid taking this sexual fiction, 
this, so to speak, “modus dicendi” or as I have 
called it, the sexual jargon, for an original ex- 
perience. In the theoretical part I have dis- 
cussed the reasons for the marked prominence of 
the sexual guiding principle in neurotics, first, 
because it, like all other guiding principles is con- 
siderably accentuated in the neurotic, and so to 
speak, felt as real instead of what it was intended 
for—namely, as a protective guiding line—and 
second, because it (the sexual guiding principle) 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 159 


leads in the direction of the masculine protest. 

Thus it happens that every desire of the aging 
neurotic woman may be referred to not only by 
herself, but with a little effort by the physician 
to a sexual analogy. Likewise, that the physi- 
cian may be able to fill the neurotic’s want of a 
protective analogy, by means of a premature of- 
fering of a sexual guiding principle in the sense 
of the orthodox Freudian school, may unques- 
tionably be inferred from the foregoing consid- 
erations. 

There is no gain so long as one does not suc- 
ceed in ridding the patient of his fiction, which 
becomes possible when he becomes more certain 
of himself, and is able to recognize his pre- 
sumably libidinous impulse as a falsifying fic- 
tion. 

Such a fiction for instance is the so-called cli- 
macteric of the male, of former authors, described 
by Freud and Kurt Mendel. The climacteric of 
woman has its psychic effect irrespective of the 
metabolic phenomena, because of the heightening 
of the feeling of inferiority. Concomitant dis- 
turbances of metabolism are only able to change 
or intensify the neurotic’s aspect, the moment it 
makes itself specifically felt through an intensi- 
fication of the insecurity. Basedow’s neurosis in 
climacteric women furnishes an example of such 
a mixed and intensified picture. The neurosis of 


160 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


the climacteric in man, is likewise only indirectly 
influenced by atrophy of the genitals, may, how- 
ever, experience an intensification through the 
aggravating abstraction, “I am no longer a man 
—I am a woman.” Inasmuch as the masculine 
guiding principle becomes intensified and hypo- 
stasized through carefulness and appropriate 
stimuli as a result of this ideologie standpoint 
those wonderful manifestations of the Johannis- 
trieb take place, the frequent occurrence of which 
in women Karin Michaelis has aptly explained 
in her “Dangerous Age.” 

Only that the sexual guiding principle is not 
the exclusive or even most essential one as is at- 
tempted to infer from a biologic point of view, 
but it must be looked upon as a form of expres- 
sion similar to other forms of desire if one is to 
face the facts squarely. 

The climacteric neurosis shows us accordingly 
only a different phase of the neurosis caused by 
the masculine protest, and the traits of character 
demonstrable in it resemble the hypostasizations 
already familiar to us. I have never seen a case 
where the neurosis became first manifested at the 
climacterium. And it is to be expected accord- 
ing to our thesis that the “climacteric” neurosis 
had already shown its face in former days, at 
times, in a mild manner, especially when favorable 
circumstances or cultural activity were able to les- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 161 


sen the attack through a partial gratification of 
the craving for power. Mostly one finds a grad- 
ually progressive intensification and spreading of 
the neurotic symptoms of some years duration, 
which an antecedently necessitated intensification 
of the craving for security permits of detection. 
An example of this would be the transformation 
of headache and occasional migraine into a trifa- 
cial neuralgia. On the intensification of a neu- 
rotic cautiousness into anxiety and occasionally 
through the discounting of an anticipated dis- 
aster, into melancholy. For these three steps of 
protection one must consult the schema contained 
in the theoretical part. 

CAUTION: for instance, as if I may lose my 
money, I may be beneath. 

ANXIETY: as if I will lose my money, I will be 
beneath. 

MELANCHOLY: as if I had lost my money, as if 
I were beneath. 

In other words, the stronger the feeling of in- 
feriority, the more intensified the fiction becomes 
and the more closely it approaches a dogma, 
through an increasing abstraction from reality. 
And the patient approximates and handles every- 
thing which brings him nearer to his guiding 
principle. Reality is along with this depreciated 
in various degrees, and the corrective routes be- 
come more and more inadequate. 


162 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


One not infrequently sees cases in which there 
come to light neurotic phenomena in the patho- 
genic periods already known to us something on 
the order of an experiment. Kisch and others 
have called attention to this anamnestic data of 
neurotic complaints formed at the onset of 
puberty. More frequently one finds in the 
anamnesis neurotic molimina menstrualia, or neu- 
roses before entering the marriage state, in the 
puerperium, or even continuously. 

After these considerations, we shall have to let 
the various guiding principles described by us 
coördinate themselves with the prime guiding 
principle. ‘The neurosis of aged people is only 
a different phase, an adaptive psychic super- 
structure built up upon the one elementary direc- 
tive principle—I wish to be a man. And this 
directive principle, which has been outrightly 
condemned to destruction, avails itself of all man- 
ner of disguise, without ever finding a satisfac- 
tory one. Frequently the impression they make 
is one of great helplessness of resignation, as 
though the patient wanted to say he knew not how 
to go about the thing. In all their plans doubt 
is prominent—vacillation never leaves them, 
along with this, however, one sees exaggerated 
explanations as if the patients wished to convince 
themselves that they are too old, or that they are 
still young. ‘The tendency is toward the gaining 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 163 


of power, influence, worth. But the feeling, that 
they want the unattainable, never leaves them. 
In the dreams one regularly finds the endeavor 
to assist the masculine protest towards expres- 
sion, to be young, to obtain sexual gratification, 
to show itself in a nude state, always, however, 
albeit at times well masked, the desire to be a 
man. Also the traits of character, the secondary 
guiding principles, show the influence of the 
craving for security. 

Pedantry, avarice, envy, craving for domi- 
nancy, and the desire to be popular, manifest 
themselves often in this disguised manner. Anx- 
iety is frequently found, it seems, as proof that 
they cannot be alone. And in consummation, 
the neurotic symptoms force the entire house- 
hold under the régime of the patient. Often the 
attempt is made in a more or less timorous con- 
cealed manner to realize a certain wish, as though 
in that event the masculine protest were assured. 

Frequently this wish manifests itself in a de- 
sire for divorce, or to move to a large city, or to 
humiliate the sons-in-law or the daughters-in-law 
as if tranquillity might be hoped for in that event. 

Difficulties in taking food, or in emptying the 
bowels, or fragmentary manifestations of imag- 
inary pregnancies and childbirths are not rare. 
Along with this they bring into use forgetfulness, 
tremulousness, here and there an occasional trau- 


164 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


matic incident, all for the purpose of bringing to 
the attention of themselves and others their grow- 
ing helplessness. 

Complaints constantly recur, every unpleasant 
incident serves a special significance, and their 
thoughts are constantly directed toward an ap- 
proaching evil. 'The demonstrative emphasizing 
of their suffering and their hesitating attitude 
serve on the one hand to throttle their social cir- 
cle, while on the other hand it is useful for the 
initiation of their withdrawal from society in the 
event of a painful anticipation of a setback. 
Psychologically this complaint may also be 
looked upon as a form of the revolt, of the mas- 
culine protest against a feeling of inferiority, it 
is intended to soften and weaken those about 
them. 

Treatment meets with considerable difficulties, 
inasmuch as the attainment of independence is 
much more difficult in advanced age, and promis- 
ing predictions cannot be so plausibly made. As 
always is the case, the personality of the psycho- 
therapeutist as well as any actual or possible suc- 
cesses of his are utilized to spur on envy, and thus 
it frequently happens that improvements serve 
to give rise to relapses. ‘Then, too, the readily 
attainable authority over them serves to disturb 
the equilibrium of these patients, inasmuch as 
never in their life were they able to adjust them- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 165 


selves readily or what is more, subordinate them- 
selves. Asa last refuge in severe cases, the self- 
sacrifice of the physician following a thorough 
analysis recommends itself, so that one is obliged 
to own up to an apparent failure of his part of 
the treatment, and offer the laurels to some other 
therapeutic method. In two of my cases, this 
expedient justified itself, in the one case the pa- 
tient, a female, was cured through the medium 
of correspondence by a Bosnian country phy- 
sician; in the other, a case of trifacial neuralgia 
of long standing which I had been treating for 
two years with varying success recovered follow- 
ing suggestions given against me in the wakeful 
state. In most of these cases, considerable im- 
provement, remissions, or even complete recov- 
eries set in of their own accord following the 
termination of the treatment. 

One of my patients, a fifty-six-year-old lady, 
had been suffering for eighteen years from anx- 
iety states, dizziness, nausea, abdominal pains 
and severe obstipation. A considerable portion 
of this period was spent either in bed or lying on 
a sofa, especially during the last eight years when 
severe pains in the back and limbs added to her 
complaints. The patient had been previously a 
robust woman but at the age of eighteen had ap- 
parently suffered for months from joint rheuma- 
tism. 


166 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Her present condition appeared to be psycho- 
genetic in nature, inasmuch as there was an ab- 
sence of corresponding organic changes, and the 
protective traits of character ' discovered by me 
were easily demonstrable. 

The advice of a hysterectomy by a prominent 
gynecologist because of some perimetritic ad- 
hesions I did not take into account since I have 
learned to understand from other cases, the eti- 
ologic significance of such maiming procedures 
in the neuroses influencing as they do the psyche 
indirectly. 

Changes, manifestations of arrests of develop- 
ment, deformities and disease of the genitals are 
frequently found in neurotics. A. Bossi cer- 
tainly is correct in emphasizing this relationship 
as I had already done before in my “Studie” 
(1907). ‘This relationship, however, lies either 
in the adjustment of a special feeling of inferior- 
ity which in the presence of a neurotic predisposi- 
tion gives occasion for the development of a neu- 
rosis or because the neurosis, developed as result 
of other causes, requires a protective allusion to 
an organic change, in order to start upon the road 
the fixed goal of the masculine protest. 

Sexual inferiority becomes, so to speak, the 

1The differential-diagnostic significance of these is beyond 


doubt. Only one must regularly take into account the simultane- 
ous existence of an organic affection. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 167 


vehicle which especially forces itself upon one’s 
attention when slight changes or even wholly 
imagined fictitious ones such as a supposed loss 
of the clitoris, enlargement of the labia-majora, 
moistening of the apertures, telling evidences of 
masturbation or anomalies of the hairy growth, 
phimoses, paraurethral passages and asymmetric 
posture of the penis or testicles, or cryptorchism 
are taken as an occasion for a symbol of the feel- 
ing of inferiority. 

This patient’s disease began during a game of 
tennis. One year before this one of her daugh- 
ters died, and her husband, a great lover of chil- 
dren, wished to have more children. The patient 
who from her earliest childhood had bewailed her 
lot, and wished to be a man, was not at all in- 
clined to gratify this wish of her husband. The 
pain which was probably caused by a twist gave 
her new food for this indistinctly conscious re- 
sistance, since that time she could not stand any 
pressure on the abdomen, her abdomen became 
for her a dainty part and by means of a further 
bringing into use of insomnia and nausea, the 
latter as a memento of pregnancy, she brought 
matters to a point where the husband, upon the 
advice of physicians, abandoned sexual concourse 
with her, and used a separate bedroom. 

Already her recital with reference to the rheu- 
matism was characteristic. She blamed her dead 


168 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


mother for everything. The latter, she com- 
plained, forced her to wash and iron in the pa- 
ternal home, always slighted her before the other 
sisters, and even in later years she was treated in 
the same hard-hearted manner. This woman’s 
greediness brought her into some difficulties. 
But her troubles, however, she attributed to her 
father, so that the latter also received his share 
of the blame. 

Such reproaches against the parents regularly 
draw attention according to my experience to an- 
other kind of reproach which the child is secretly 
making against the parents, when it finds itself 
incomplete, or what’s more, unmanly. Such re- 
proaches become abstract later on, as I have 
shown it to be likewise true of the feeling of guilt, 
and in later life serve the purpose, so to speak, 
of shells to be filled up with different content. 
Thus it later on sounds as if the parents were not 
affectionate enough, or that they pampered the 
child, or that especially during the masturbation 
period they did not supervise him sufficiently. 
In short, we observe in these formulations of an 
attitude towards the parents and later on towards 
the world, formal changes such as are in line with 
guiding principles which are to serve a practical 
purpose, and we frequently see a different guise 
cut according to the pattern of the actual situ- 
ation. It is then necessary to retrace the steps 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 169 


covered by the formal change. Here the ana- 
lytical method makes use of the medium of re- 
duction, of simplification (Nietzsche) of abstrac- 
tion. Along with the formal change accentu- 
ations or attenuations of the guiding fiction 
play an important role. The more insecure the 
patient feels himself, the more he is driven by an 
unconscious tendency towards an intensification 
of his guiding principle, to make himself depend- 
ent upon it. I readily follow here the worthy 
views of Vaihinger, who maintains for the history 
of ideas, that historically considered they show a 
tendency to grow from a fiction (an unreal but 
practically useful safety-device) to hypotheses 
and later to dogmas. This change of intensity 
characterizes in a general way individual psychol- 
ogy, the thinking of the normal individual (fic- 
tion as an expedient) of the neurotic (attempt 
to realize the fiction) and of the insane (incom- 
plete but protective anthropomorphism and real- 
ization of the fiction: dogmatization). 

The stronger inner need seeks adjustment 
through an intensification of the assuring guiding 
principles. We will therefore regularly find 
equivalents of the neurotics’ and psychotics’ guid- 
ing principles and characteristics in the normal 
individual, which in the latter may become cor- 
rected in order that they may be able to approach 
reality without contradiction. If we were to re- 


170 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


duce the manifest guiding principles of this pa- 
tient, and free them of the various changes of 
form and intensity which they have undergone, 
so that we may take them in the original, not in 
the form developed later on, it would read, “I 
am a woman and want to be aman.” ‘The nor- 
mal individual, too, adjusts himself throughout 
life in accordance with this formula. It aids him 
in attaching himself to our masculine culture, yes, 
it furnishes the latter with a steady impetus to- 
wards masculization (Vermännlichung). But 
here it plays a role similar to the Hilfslinie in a 
geometric construction. So soon as the object, 
a higher manly niveau is attained, it is lost from 
consideration (Vaihinger). Concerning the 
myth, a guiding principle of the race, Nietzsche 
laments its transformation into the fairy tale and 
demands a transformation into the manly (Mann- 
liche). The neurotic emphasizes this fiction, 
takes it altogether too literally, and endeavors to 
bring about its realization. 

His object is not the dovetailing, the adjust- 
ment of his masculine prestige, but to give it 
value, which is mostly unattainable in its over- 
strained form or because of intrinsic contradic- 
tions in the masculine protest, or is hindered in 
its attainment because of the fear of a threaten- 
ing defeat, the patient still remaining ignorant 
of the significance and scope of his largely un- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 171 


conscious fiction. But his more intense feeling 
of uncertainty and inferiority also hinders him 
in the proper estimation of his fiction. The in- 
sane man conducts himself as if his fiction were a 
reality. He acts under the most intense urgency 
and delivers himself unto his self-created deity, 
which he apperceives as real. In a similar man- 
ner he simultaneously feels himself to be woman 
and superman, the latter as a reaction of the ex- 
aggerated masculine protest. The splitting of 
the personality corresponds to the psychic her- 
maphroditism, the formal change being a mani- 
fold one, manifests itself for the instant in the 
combination of ideas of persecution and grand- 
eur, of depression and mania, whereas fixation 
as self-protection, is made facile through a rela- 
tive insufficiency or absolute weakness of the cor- 
rective paths. If one were to remove from 
Freud’s equation of dementia (“Yearbook,” 
Bleuler-Freud, 1911) the introduced sexualiza- 
tion, if one were to shorten it on both sides of the 
superfluous libido factor, our much more pro- 
found formula of the psychic hermaphroditism 
with the masculine protest comes to the surface, 
against which, missing entirely its true signifi- 
cance, Freud argues in his work. 

To come back to the case history, it still re- 
mains to be mentioned that our patient in her 
feeling of insufficiency brought forth various 


172 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


forms of the masculine protest. ‘Thus she was 
unable to bring herself to remain tolerant of 
men’s accomplishments. In this regard, she 
could be quite critical, especially when some one 
tried to overestimate himself. In these cases it 
not infrequently happens that physicians with a 
self-confident demeanor, which appears to be an 
essential to some in the treatment of disease, are 
antagonized by the patient with neurotic impetu- 
ousness and with the same means. In this case, 
she was, aside from this, naturally guided by a 
sort of instinct which forbade her to adopt the 
physician’s instructions, out of respect to the pur- 
pose of her disease. But at times matters reached 
such a point where a harmless gain of influence 
over her by the physician was responded to by 
vomiting and nausea, in connection with which 
the patient never missed a chance to call atten- 
tion to the unsuccessful effort of the physician. 
One need not lose one’s tranquillity on account 
of this sort of manifestation, one must rather see 
in them a part of the entire whole, a formal 
change of the original envy of man and later of 
every one believed to be superior. 

Along with this our patient made extensive use 
of certain privileges given her by her illness. 
First of all she was able to withdraw herself as 
much as she wished to from the social duties im- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 173 


posed upon her by the role of housewife and im- 
portant personage of a provincial city. 

’Tis true she received visitors, to whom she 
complained of her sufferings, but only exception- 
ally returned a call, thus assuring herself as is 
the case regularly with neurotics, of a favored and 
privileged position. Along with this it was pos- 
sible to avoid comparisons and musterings, in one 
sense also trials, occasions for which social activi- 
ties furnish as a rule. Of late years she has be- 
sides been frightened by the idea that she was 
being robbed as a result of her growing age, of 
the possibilities of wielding influence over men. 
A lady friend demonstrated to her very inti- 
mately how ridiculously society looks upon 
youthful conduct in an aging woman. ‘Thus she 
decided by her way of dressing to lay special em- 
phasis on her age, but at the same time the bitter 
thought crowded itself to the surface of her con- 
sciousness that men of her age are by no means 
pushed into the corner. 

At all times she felt bitterly the fact that she 
had to spend her life in a provincial city. In- 
stinctively she strove in many ways for a removal 
to Vienna. However, this was not to be at- 
tained in an open battle with her husband, who 
was many years her senior, because he disarmed 
her with his inexhaustible affection and his com- 


174 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


pliance in all other matters. She quarreled most 
bitterly with her brother and arranged an unbe- 
lievable anxiety of meeting this brother in this 
small town. When this did not suffice to bring 
about her object, she developed a most obstinate 
insomnia, as the most important cause of which 
she blamed the nightly rattling of wagons before 
the windows of her bedroom. Thus she brought 
about a temporary removal to Vienna, acquired a 
home in the neighborhood of her daughter, the 
heavenly peacefulness of which she constantly 
emphasized, and where she likewise regained her 
sleep. 

Ever since her daughter lived in Vienna, the 
small provincial city became progressively more 
obnoxious to her. The analysis revealed in ac- 
cordance with the other directive principles that 
she intensely envied her daughter’s prestige with 
which there was also associated an aristocratic 
predicate. 

She, too, wanted to live in Vienna, and would 
have brought this about long ago, had not a new 
danger threatened her in Vienna, namely, to have 
to cover her daughter’s expenses with her own 
means. 

The rivalry with this Viennese daughter was 
wholly contained in her unconscious, and corre- 
sponded with an infantile guiding line, the wish 
to surpass her pampered older sister. ‘This guid- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 175 


ing principle, too, was found to be an equivalent 
of the basic one, which strove toward the attain- 
ment of greater worth, as if she were a man. 

On account of the heavy expenditures which 
her residence in Vienna imposed upon her there 
arose a contradiction in her masculine protest. 
The neurotic with his torturing feeling of inade- 
quacy does not allow anything to be taken from 
him without suffering for it. 

He apprehends a further belittling (Verkür- 
zung) as a lowering of his ego-consciousness and 
along with his guiding principle in such a way as 
if this were a castration, an effeminization, a sex- 
ual assault at times also in the image of a preg- 
nancy or birth.? 

In our case the analogous sensations of preg- 
nancy came especially to the surface, nausea, ab- 
dominal cramps and fixed ideas of an existing 
pregnancy made themselves felt, pains in the 
limbs represented a phlegmasia alba dolens, 
whereas an obstinate obstipation symbolized in 
part a vaginismus in the anal language, in part 


2 Thus it is that the thought process takes place not along real- 
ity, but depends on analogous symbols, whose falsifying affective 
accompaniment heightens the aggressive preparedness of the 
neurotic. The latter, however, corresponds to the unconscious, 
guiding “opinion.” ‘This disguise, the symbol, the analogy are as 
a device in the service of the aggressiveness to which the ego-ideal 
of the neurotic compels. 

The woman as a Sphinx, the man as a murderer, etc. 


176 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


attempting to prevent expenditures symbolically, 
and thirdly attempted to express the impossibility 
of an independent conduct. 

A more profound understanding of the mode 
of expression of the neurosis appears to me to be 
impossible without the knowledge of the “organ- 
jargon” discovered by me. Folklore takes cog- 
nizance of this in the expression of popular speech 
and custom. Freud misunderstood this Jargon, 
and has created out of its constructions the main- 
stay of his libido-theory, namely the theory of 
the erogenous zones. Especially his work on the 
anal character and analerotic is full of a strained 
and overworked phantasy. ‘The point of outset 
is the relative inferiority of certain organs, the 
attitude of the environment towards the mani- 
festations of these organs as well as the mass- 
impressions of the two upon the soul of the child. 
Neurotically predisposed children will endeavor 
to associate with suitable manifestations of their 
organ-inferiority especially with defects of child- 
hood, those traits of character which have their 
origin in their protesting ego-consciousness, such 
as obstinacy, greater need of affection, exagger- 
ated cleanliness, pedantry, anxiousness, ambition, 
envy, revengefulness, etc., in order to gain an 
especially effective representation. One of my 
psychogenic epileptics utilized for the purpose of 
strengthening his masculine protest such a device, 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 177 


an interlacing, so to speak, inasmuch as he man- 
aged to have most of his attacks preceded by an 
attack of obstipation in order to arouse anxious 
forebodings in his relatives and thus bring him- 
self to their notice in the event of a degradation. 

Obstinacy and infantile negativism may al- 
ready be well developed towards the end of the 
nursing period. It is the association of these 
anomalies of urination, defecation, and eating, 
which gives rise to the heightened “reasoning.” 
The child who abstains from emptying his bowels 
derives his pleasurable sensations not from an 
irritation of the rectum, but from the satisfaction 
of his obstinacy which avails itself of this unes- 
thetic means, but may, however, attribute a pleas- 
ure-quality to rectal sensations for years, up to 
the curing of his obstinacy. 

The mother of a nearly two-year-old girl who 
was still suffering from bed-wetting told me that 
she had frequently observed that when awakened 
from her sleep her child would attend properly 
to the emptying of the bladder, providing she was 
still in a half-wakeful state only, but no sooner 
did she become fully awake than she refused to 
do so. If the child became fully awake towards 
the end of urination, she upset the urinal and 
cried a long time out of rage at being thus taken 
unawares; if, on the other hand, she still continued 
half asleep she turned over and went fast asleep. 


178 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Thus we may find in every case that from the 
very earliest period of existence the ego-con- 
sciousness of the child finds itself in a manifest 
and latent contrast with its environment, that it 
assumes a most pronounced attitude of hostility 
and belligerency until it finally brings about a 
uniform termination of all these aggressive stim- 
uli, until it constructs these into the masculine 
protest which it brings in opposition to the stim- 
uli of tenderness, subordinacy, and weakness, as 
well as to the manifestations of inferiority, all of 
which it collectiveiy apperceives and combats as 
symptoms of femininity. Only that at times an 
interlacing and intertwining takes place, where 
the masculine protest lays stress upon feminine 
symptoms in order to utilize them as a bugbear, 
or where he obstinately retains feminine symp- 
toms and this makes possible the development of 
hermaphrodistic constructions which likewise 
exert their influence in the direction of the mascu- 
line protest. For example, tears, indispositions, 
simulations and exaggerations of childhood de- 
fects. The overaccentuated guiding principle, 
namely, “I wish to be a man,” enlists then within 
its ranks all utilizable bodily symptoms, particu- 
larly those manifestations of inferiority upon 
which the attention of the patient as well as that 
of the environment is especially directed. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 179 


Thus it happens that the masculine protest 
makes use of a “somatic language” for the pur- 
pose of gaining expression. A beautiful exam- 
ple, one which frequently recurs in neurotic phan- 
tasies is that of Leonardo da Vinci’s childhood 
phantasy: “A vulture repeatedly shoved its tail 
into his mouth.” This phantasy carries the art- 
ist’s psychic constellation to a most accurate ab- 
straction. Mouth phantasies are regularly re- 
lated to manifestations of inferiority in the child’s 
gastro-intestinal tract. Leonardo’s inclinations 
to a science of nutrition were most likely the fruits 
of the attention directed to these channels. 

The tail of the vulture is a phallic symbol. A 
summing up of these two trends brings forth the 
characteristic basic idea, “I will experience the 
lot of the woman.” But this rigid adherence to a 
symbolic guiding principle already draws our at- 
tention to the fact that these and similar trends 
of thought do not signify a psychic settlement 
but serve, under the pressure of our masculine 
culture, for a heightened impetus in the opposite 
direction, must lead to an over compensation to- 
ward the masculine side, where they evolve the 
masculine guiding principle the more distinctly, 
“therefore I must act in such a manner as if I 
were a complete man.” 

That these two guiding principles contradict 


180 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


one another, aside from the fact that each indi- 
vidually is a contradiction to reality, in so far as 
they are taken literally and not as something 
useful and corrigible, I have already set forth in 
my contribution on the “Psychic hermaphroditism 
in life and in the neurosis” (“Fortschritte der 
Medizin,” Leipzig, 1908). 

This contradiction is reflected in doubt, in inde- 
cision, and in fear of making decisions, the analy- 
sis of which reveals more or less the fact that 
there existed in early childhood an uncertainty as 
to the future sexual role, in the psychic super- 
structure of which all later sensations, feelings 
and stimuli were grouped in a certain sense as 
doubtful, “I don’t know whether I am a man or a 
woman” (see “Predispositions to Neurosis,” 
Year Book, Bleuler-Freud, 1909). 

Our patient expressed in the anal language 
that she had closed up an opening. A distinctly 
feminine thought. One may picture to himself 
a group of men and women dressed in women’s 
clothes gathered in a room into which a mouse 
was suddenly let loose. ‘The women will at once 
betray their sex in that they will draw their 
clothes around their legs, as if they tried to pre- 
vent the mouse from entering. In the same 
manner, the feminine frightening guiding princi- 
ple is betrayed by a fear of holes, of being bitten, 
stabbed, ideas of persecution by men, by bulls, 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 181 


the position of the back, the being pulled to the 
right, backwards, to be pressed upon, to fall, 
etc., a guiding principle which is readily reacted 
to with an insuring anxiety.? 

Obstipation as a neurotic symptom takes its 
origin in a hereditary defect of the intestines, 
which leads to a neurotic closure of the sphincter 
through ideas concerning anal birth and sexual 
relation. As a matter of fact this patient suf- 
fered in her childhood from intestinal catarrh 
and occasional intestinal incontinence, later from 
obstipation and a recto-vaginal fistula. 

That the closure of the anus was under the 
domination of a guiding idea of closing of cavities 
is likewise seen from the fact that the patient 
suffered for a considerable length of time follow- 
ing her marriage from vaginismus. The obsti- 
pation of this aging woman expresses in a dual 
way the same desire as did her erstwhile vaginis- 
mus, namely, “I don’t want to be a woman, I 
want to be a man.” 

At this point I must for practical, as well as 
for theoretical reasons go considerably beyond 
the scope of a mere character delineation, as one 
is for that matter usually compelled to take into 
account the psyche as a whole in every discussion 

3 The same masculine protest leads in the neurosis to trismus, 


blepharospasmus, vaginismus, spasm of the sphincter, globus and 
spasm of vocal cords. 


182 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


of psychological questions. Besides this so mi- 
nutely analyzed case furnishes a clearer insight 
than it is possible to gain in other cases, espe- 
cially where because of a dependence upon the 
physician or upon extraneous circumstances a 
cure or discontinuance of the treatment takes 
place before the scheme, according to which the 
patient built his psychosis, becomes completely 
revealed. Thus I will attempt to set forth in this 
case, this scheme, by arranging according to this 
analytically disclesed scheme all her symptoms, 
the sentinels opposite the outer world, and show 
the synthetic relationship of the traits of charac- 
ter with it. 

According to this scheme (p. 184-6) the pa- 
tient arranged all her experiences, and wherever 
they fitted at all, occasion for which is amply fur- 
nished in the life of every individual by his sym- 
bolic as well as purposive apperceptions, she 
reacted to them with the appropriate disease 
manifestations. ‘The protective traits of charac- 
ter were pushed to the fore, like outposts, were 
ever ready for defense, and explained situations 
in accordance with guiding thoughts, and when- 
ever the occasion arose, borrowed support from 
the sum total of the appropriate symptoms. 
Her manifestations of independence were con- 
siderably interfered with by the intelligent and 
tender attitude of her husband and by certain 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 183 


benevolent guiding principles of the patient. 
Thus it happened that the basic scheme, “I’m 
only a woman,” derived its influence from inten- 
tionally retained impressions of the feminine 
role, in connection with which the unconscious 
mechanism of the masculine guiding thoughts 
furnished the protecting memento. The healthy 
woman is characterized by a more conscious atti- 
tude toward the feminine role by a purposive 
dovetailing and corrective approximation of the 
scheme to reality. The psychosis produced an 
accentuation of the imaginary scheme for protec- 
tive purposes, and an incorrigible attitude within 
this scheme; such a patient will conduct herself 
as if she really were pregnant. In all three 
cases the fiction of pregnancy and the greater 
circle of its manifestations, a symbol of the infe- 
rior feminine role, a convincing expression for 
the feeling of degradation, but at the same time 
looked upon from the standpoint of the mascu- 
line protest, an artifice for the purpose of avoid- 
ing further degradation, as was shown above.* 

4 The transformation of the masculine fiction may reach a point 
where under its direction maternity, pregnancy, may be striven 
for, quite frequently in such cases where obstacles of a very gross 
nature exist. The cry for a baby is then regularly directed 


against the man. Phantom pregnancies frequently represent such 
an arrangement, 


184 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


SCHEME 


SYMPTOMS 


Fear of society. 


Compulsive blush- 
ing 


Fear of being 
alone. 

Palpitation of the 
heart. 

Fear of falling, 
dizziness when in 
high places. 


Feeling of pres- 
sure in the stom- 
ach. (Cxcum.) 

Frigidity. Over- 
acuity of hear- 
ing of husband’s 
snoring. 

Vaginismus, pres- 
sure sensations 
over the breasts. 


The leaning 
from the 
feminine 
role, the mas- 
culine pro- 
test. 


— 


Protection 
against 
courting, 


Protection 
against 
coitus. 


Protective 
dexterities. 





Mistrust (cre- 
dulity with 
subsequent 
protest). 


Belittling of 
man. 

Anxiousness. 

Bashfulness 
(timidity). 

Virtuous mo- 
rality. 

Desire to domi- 
nate (submis- 
sion with sub- 
sequent pro- 
test). 


Willfulness. 
Obstinacy. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 185 


Inability to stand 
any kind of 


pressure, the 
struggle against 
the corset. 


A feeling of being 
drawn to the 
right and down- 
ward (towards 
the feminine 
side). 

Noises in the ears. 
(The noise of 
the moving sea, 
which swells and 
falls.) 


Abdominal pains. 

Shortness of 
breath. 

Palpitation of the 
heart. 

Nausea. 

Vomiting. 

Compulsory ideas 
of pregnancy. 


Fatigue. 
Craving for cer- 
tain foods. 


Abdominal cramps. 

Difficult evacuation 
of the bowels, 
signifying  diffi- 
cult labor. 

Occasional polyu- 
ria. (Passing of 
the waters.) 


Proteetion 
against 
coitus. 


Protection 
against 
pregnancy. 


Protection 
against 


parturition. 


Disputatious- 
ness. 
Tendencies hos- 
tile to the 
husband. 


Somatic over- 
sensitiveness. 

Hypochon- 
driacally to 
pamper one- 
self. 


186 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Objection to lying 


on bed. 
Pain in legs. 
Tendency to pro- 


long invalidism. | 


Weakness in limbs, 
reminding one 
of astasia and 
abasia. 

Staggering gait. 

Easy fatiguibility 
in walking. 


A hostile, at times 
sadistic behavior 
towards children. 

Rapid fatiguing, 
tiring and impa- 
tience in the care 
of children. 

Insomnia. 

Finickiness in mat- 
ters of cleanli- 
ness. 

Over-acuteness of 
hearing at night. 

Light sleeping. 


Protection 


A fiction against 
puerperium. 
thrombo- 
phlebitis 


A memento 
of leaving 

the child- 
bed. 


Protection 
against 
maternal 
duties. 


Form of action 


of a complex 
type for the 
purpose of 
doing away 
with the infe- 
riority and 
degradation. 


Avarice, thrift- 


iness, envy, 
desire to dom- 
inate, impa- 
tience, fear 
of attaining 
nothing, of 
completing 
nothing, all 
sorts of exer- 
tions, as if 
the distance 
toward equal- 
ity with men 
were to be 
diminished in 
any possible 
way. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 187 


A dream which took place towards the end of 
the treatment shows us the original guiding 
thought of the patient in connection with her 
actual inner conflicts. She dreamed: “As if 
she were sitting on a bench in a park near the 
residence of her parents, ill and weak. She wore 
on her head two bathing caps. Two girls then 
approached from behind her and one of them 
tore one of the caps from her head. She grabbed 
hold of the girl and held her while the other one 
disappeared and threatened to report her to the 
police. A poor, badly clothed woman passed by 
and told her that the girl’s name was Velicka. 
At this point she went to her mother in order to 
complain. Her mother gave her a basket full of 
eggs and said they cost 5 guldens. She took two 
of the eggs in her hand and saw that they were 
pretty. 

The situation on the bench; her fatigue and 
the bathing caps referred to a hydropathic treat- 
ment which she had undertaken especially for the 
removal of an insomnia prior to coming under 
my care. On the day preceding the dream she 
reprimanded her daughter because the latter 
used her bath linen for her own use; she also pos- 
sessed two bathing caps, as in the dream, which 
the daughter likewise often used. Velicka is a 
Slavie word signifying big. The daughter had 
a Slavic “Adelspraedikat.” The poorly-dressed 


188 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


woman is a noblewoman by the name of Grand- 
venire. Opposed to the two is she, the plebeian, 
degraded one. She was dissatisfied because her 
husband was not knighted, but on account of her 
pride she did not acknowledge this envy. She 
was afraid that the daughter might be able to 
take everything away from her. She had two 
daughters, one died, disappeared. She often 
complained to me that her daughter cost her 
much money. She has already given her all her 
jewelry. From her very childhood she has al- 
ways been degraded before others. Even her 
mother always humbled her and demanded pay- 
ment from her for every little thing after the 
patient had become married. She, on the other 
hand, supplied her daughter regularly with eggs, 
venison, milk, butter, etc., and still she needed so 
much money. Before she left for Vienna she 
forgot to settle a debt of 5 guldens. The day 
previous she wrote to her husband that he should 
pay this at once. Im fact she always had to pay 
at once for everything she bought.’ 

The mother treated her badly. In the dream 
she recalled a forgotten obligation. She always 

5 The fear to become humiliated through further expenses is 
closely allied to the utilization of the character-type of greed and 
parsimony. These maternal, and according to her way of looking, 
feminine traits, she avoided through a compulsion to pay before- 


hand and showed herself to be superior to her mother through her 
liberality. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 189 


saved at her expense. In the dream she re- 
ceived from her mother the masculine attribute 
(testicles) which the mother kept from her at the 
time of birth. We see again how out of the feel- 
ing of femininity (degradation) the masculine 
protest is in the dream directed against further 
insults. This dream shows us the attempt of the 
patient to evade in her thoughts further degrada- 
tion and to accuse her daughter that like her 
mother she kept everything from her. 

Similarly, this lust to possess everything is 
found in the following case history which shows 
still more clearly than the preceding case how 
the patient on account of his pride seeks to re- 
move this lust from his field of vision, to repress 
it. We shall see how a decided change takes 
place through the revelation of this repression 
and through the elucidation of the Gidipus com- 
plex. In the same manner it appears from all 
these cases that this lust to have everything pur- 
sues the most senseless goals. Such patients 
have eyes for everything which others in their 
circle possess in so far as they are excluded from 
the possession of the same. ‘They may possess 
more than the others and yet they will envy them. 
They may gain everything which they formerly 
begrudged others and will then unceremoniously 
set it aside in order to furnish new goals for their 
desires and possessions. And their lust for pos- 


190 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


session ever remains attached to those goals which 
they have not attained. It is readily understood 
that they are incapacitated for love and friend- 
ship. Often they acquire a general ability to 
misrepresent and set out to captivate souls be- 
cause others also dominate. They constantly 
fear degradation and-always seek to assure them- 
selves long beforehand. The love of the parents 
enjoyed by the brother, their jewelry, the mar- 
riage of a brother or of a sister, a book, an accom- 
plishment of an acquaintance or even of a total 
stranger, fill them with rage.° 

The superiority of another, a successfully 
passed examination, possession or worth of broth- 
ers and sisters throw them into excitements, 
cause them headache, insomnia and more pro- 
nounced neurotic symptoms. Their constant 
fear not to become the equal of an older or 
younger brother may render them unfit for work. 
It is then that they attempt to avoid all decisions 
and tests, it is then that they reach the stage of 
loss of initiative, approach often in any possible 
way the withdrawal from life and support them- 
selves in the meanwhile on their ad hoc created 
symptoms among which there came to my atten- 

6 Thus an approaching marriage of a girl may lead to the devel- 
opment of a neurosis in the brother or father when the latter are 


neurotically disposed. Thus the arrangement of affection may 
then give the impression of incest stirrings. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 191 


tion frequently compulsory blushing, migraine, 
all sorts of headaches, palpitation of the heart, 
stuttering, agoraphobia and claustrophobia, 
tremor, sleepiness, depression, weakness of mem- 
ory, excessive thirst and psychogenic epilepsy. 

I have especially emphasized above the case of 
the younger brother because I met with him often- 
est and because he is most apt to be driven to 
rivalry." This case is not an exception. One 
also finds in this role older siblings or only chil- 
dren, naturally also girls. The rivalry may also 
be directed primarily against the father or mother 
in whose picture the desired superiority appears 
to be concretely represented. It is then that the 
(Edipus-complex develops out of the longing of 
the predisposed child, as a guiding model, a guid- 
ing fiction to gain satisfaction for his craving, and 
this takes place at a time when sexual craving is 
still out of the question, but it is also the desire to 
possess a person or an object which belongs to an- 
other. A belief in predestination and ideas of 
identification with God frequently develop as 
manifestations of the masculine protest. Klep- 
tomania is frequently revealed in the anamneses 
of these patients. At times the patient is uncon- 
scious of his guiding principle. Occasionally he 
is seen at work trying to conceal this guiding prin- 


7 Frischauf, “Psychology of the Younger Brother.” Munich, 
A. Reinhardt, 1912. 


192 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ciple and to make it unrecognizable through a 
manifestation of opposed tendencies such as lib- 
erality. 

The wish which, for instance, draws him to his 
mother, changes nothing after it has become con- 
scious in the disease-picture, no matter how 
frankly sexual it may be shown to be. It is only 
after the patient understands and controls his 
desire for the unattainable, for that which in the 
nature of things belongs to another, that recov- 
ery may take place. 

The boundless pride which one detects in some 
of these cases does not readily permit the patient 
to gain insight into his envy and jealousy. The 
tendency to belittle others is, on the other hand, 
quite markedly developed and readily comes to 
the surface. Malice, revengefulness, desire for 
intrigue (and in those of lower intelligence), 
more crudely aggressive tendencies, even sadistic 
and murder-instincts reveal themselves as at- 
tempts to insure oneself against a degradation in 
this eternal rivalry. The fear of the conse- 
quences, such as a lively concern about the needs 
of relatives, the picturing to oneself of punish- 
ments, arrest and misery are appertaining assur- 
ances against the ebullitions of the masculine 
protest. Even epileptic seizures may serve as 
security devices, thus, for instance, as in our 
case, where a psycho-epileptic insult associated 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 193 


itself with patricidal and fratricidal dream-stir- 
rings. 

It is possible that the motive of a “scorned 
love” regularly plays a role in these cases, and 
brings about the most intense hate against the un- 
attained person. One may justly doubt whether 
love in a normal person is capable of such a trans- 
formation. It requires the sum-total of power- 
instincts, the over-heated ego-consciousness of 
these individuals to desire to bring about the spir- 
itual possession of another person against that 
person’s will. Inasmuch as the neurotic desires 
to possess everything, he is blind to all natural 
restrictions, and experiences in the scorn of his 
love a thrust at his most sensitive principle. 
Now he turns to revenge: Acheronta movebo. 

When one is in doubt as to which of two per- 
sons the patient has selected for his affections, 
whether the father or mother, it is safe to assume 
that it is the opposite to the one the patient men- 
tions. It would be too painful, as a rule, to ac- 
knowledge scorned love. An exact solution 
seems to me to be furnished by the following sim- 
ple experiment: 

One places the patient exactly between the two 
persons in question, and soon one observes that 
he has moved nearer the preferred one. 

Thus I was able to discover in the case which 
I am about to discuss in detail that the patient 


194 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


showed decided preference for his mother, though 
when he was alone he always gave preference to 
his father. He not infrequently scolded his 
mother, and not a day passed but what they quar- 
reled. 

A certain manifestation which one frequently 
observes in the neuroses was likewise present 
here, and in an especially accentuated form, 
namely, the strong emphasis of a pedantic char- 
acter trait, which, not unlike the “crack regi- 
ment” in war time, took over the task of coming 
in touch with the enemy. ‘The enemy was first 
of all the mother, and the daily battles regularly 
developed because the latter was unable to do full 
justice to the patient’s pedantic demands in eat- 
ing, in dressing, in the preparation of his bath or 
bed. Our patient thus gained a base of oper- 
ation—from which emanated the various subter- 
fuges by means of which he endeavored to place 
his mother, after all, completely at his service. 
In this is seen again a neurotic trait of character 
as a device, by means of which the patient seeks 
to be true to his inner fiction, to dominate his 
mother in the same manner as he believed to have 
observed his father dominate her. “And should 
you be unwilling, T’ll use force.” This train of 
thought gained stability from the patient in his 
youth, and thus he at once assumed towards his 
mother an attitude full of mistrust, constantly 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 195 


on the alert for setbacks, for the preferring of 
others, full of tense energy and gloomy expecta- 
tion whether he will yet succeed in gaining her 
for himself. Not because he really loved her, or 
really desired to possess her, but because his de- 
sire for possession of her was similar to the desire 
which he had for many other things, jewelry, bon- 
bons, which he valued not at all highly, but left 
lying in a drawer, forgotten, once he could call 
them hisown. ‘Thus the possession of the mother 
was not an end in itself, his desire was not at all 
a libidinous or sexual one, but the mother and his 
distance from her became a symbol for him, an 
estimate of his own inferiority. And because he 
apperceived the cosmic picture, every new ac- 
quaintance, every relation to the opposite sex 
with the same traits of character, suspiciously, 
full of sensitiveness, with a similar expectation 
of a disappointment, all success fled from him, all 
satisfaction in life was lost to him. He had eyes 
only for everything which spoke against him, 
against his success, and whatever he did attain 
lost all charm for him. He settled the problem 
of his life with the arrangement of his neurosis. 
He considered himself deficient by a whole lot— 
and this deficiency was represented in the sym- 
bolic loss of the mother. 

Does one suppose that this patient who had 
been suffering from anxiety-states, migraine and 


196 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


depressions, could have been cured if his mother 
were returned to him? Such an attempt would 
have been fruitless at the time the patient came 
to the physician. Even the most compliant 
mother—and many of them are _lastingly 
estranged from their sons—could not have shown 
that measure of patience and sacrifice which the 
patient demanded in his boundless mistrust and 
desire for dominancy. The past, and the 
thought of former privations, were ever ready to 
furnish motives for new outbreaks and oppres- 
sions. It is possible that the attempt at cure 
might have been a successful one in the patient’s 
childhood, a pedagogic solution of this special 
neurotic problem in a gradual orientation and 
independence of the child, and an appropriate 
tranquilizing of the child concerning his future. 
It is the wncertainty which mars the outlook for 
the future in these children, an uncertainty whose 
organic and psychic roots we already know. In 
our case it was the fact that the patient, already 
as a child, even during the suckling period 
showed a tendency to become easily frightened 
and panicky. This fright of sucklings—which is 
frequently taken as nervousness—is obviously an 
organic inheritance and is associated, according 
to my observations, with an hereditary sensitive- 
ness, inferiority of the auditory apparatus, so 
that children already become panicky in the pres- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 197 


ence of noises and tones to which other children 
pay no unusual attention. From our standpoint 
this striking tendency to fright signifies a sign 
of an hereditary, auditory oversensitiveness, a 
manifestation of a somatic inferiority of the 
familiar ear diseases, but likewise corresponds to 
a heightened refinement of hearing in the musical 
sense. The fact that our patient suffered at the 
age of 6 years from a protracted middle ear 
disease which necessitated paracentesis of the ear 
drum, is in accord with our views concerning 
somatic inferiority; similarly, his development 
of an excellent musical ear and of a strikingly re- 
fined sensitiveness in hearing which especially 
qualified him for eavesdropping. This somatic 
refinement brings with it that the child is driven to 
a development of a tendency towards a lurking 
curiosity, even though he may feel more marked 
uncertainties from other causes. The roots of 
this uncertainty from which he endeavors to es- 
cape by means of his curiosity, laid in the patient’s 
weaker intellect, compared with an older brother 
—who as it often happens to the detriment of 
bringing up—made of the patient the plaything 
of his railleries and often made a fool of him. 

The patient also recalled to have suffered from 
that form of cryptorchism in which a testicle oc- 
casionally disappears into the abdominal cavity 
through the patent canal. This fact, that is, the 


198 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


better sexual development of his brother, the ear- 
lier maturity of the latter, brought to his mind 
quite early the thought that he is perhaps a girl 
after all. Up tothe fourth year of his life he was 
dressed in girls’ clothes, and during this period he 
developed the fear that he never perhaps would 
reach the mature state of his father or his older 
brother, that is, never become a complete man. 
The marked development of his breasts lent con- 
siderable weight to his uncertainty. That he un- 
consciously gave considerable thought to the ques- 
tion of the difference of the sexes, one may glean 
from an occurrence which remained fixed in his 
memory, because at the time he told it every one 
laughed at him. One day while in a public park 
he watched a girl urinate and upon reaching home 
related how he had seen a boy urinate from be- 
hind.® 

This early period in his life was of marked sig- 
nificance in shaping his attitude towards his fam- 
ily and in a broader sense to the world at large. 
He saw himself belittled, and his feeling of infe- 
riority found no adjustment in the family. His 
covetousness, his craving to become the equal of 

8 The original uncertainty of the sexual röle, as I have been 
emphasizing for years, plays one of the chief parts in the develop- 
ment of the neurotic psyche, which is later on vitalized as a sym- 
bol and base of operation in the struggle for dominancy. It is 


only of late that many authorities are beginning to agree with me 
on this point. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 199 


his brother, of his father, of anyone whom he con- 
sidered strong, able, powerful, gained in intensity 
and directed him upon paths in which he came 
into serious conflicts with his parents. He be- 
came a bad, unmanageable child, which made a 
tender attitude of his parents towards him still 
more difficult. His desires assumed measureless 
proportions, he began to insure himself against 
every setback suspiciously and with a growing 
choler, and this at a time when his maturing geni- 
talia, his strikingly hairy body, his improved in- 
sight into matters sexual, should have had their 
tranquilizing effect upon him. But by this time 
his position in the family became such an un- 
favorable one, owing to the development of his 
traits of character, which likewise unfavorably in- 
fluenced his school work, that with his over-sensi- 
tive nature he had good reason to feel himself 
slighted and belittled. Thus he was no longer 
able to find the road to normality. ‘That he, how- 
ever, continued to apperceive this slight—in the 
manner of an analogy with the feminine röle—be- 
came already evident from the first dream which 
he recited during the treatment. The dream was 
“I felt as if I were witnessing an ape nursing a 
child,” 

His brother often called him an ape because 
of his excessive hairy growth, which he neverthe- 
less exhibited with pride. The ape, which is 


200 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


nursing the child, a female ape, is he himself— 
that is, he sees himself, he feels himself in a femi- 
nine role, along with which the nursing is to be 
considered a gynecomastia (“Gynmakomastie” ) 
which came up during the dream analysis. This 
is the feminine principle emphasized by me for 
all dreams—against which the stressing of the 
excessive hairy growth is to be understood as 
pointing in the direction of the masculine pro- 
test. Thus the patient enters upon the treat- 
ment with the disclosure that he feels himself be- 
littled—and permits us to divine from the choice 
of his figure of speech, that he evaluates this in- 
feriority as feminine. 

I wish to draw attention, in this connection, to 
the fact that the dreamer often chooses pictures 
and forms of expression which show a simul- 
taneous coloring of feminine and masculine traits. 
Here it was an ape, whose nursing was a feminine 
characteristic, while the hairy growth is to be 
apperceived as a masculine characteristic. Such 
forms of expression which I have recognized as 
belonging to the psychic hermaphroditism may be 
referred to two simplifying circumstances. 
First, they correspond to the infantile indefinite- 
ness of sex-cognition. Second, because the ele- 
ment of time, as in other cases, the element of 
space, is during the marked abstraction of the 
dream state wholly or almost wholly eliminated, 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 201 


so that his thoughts which may be separated 
spatially or temporally, become united—in one 
case the thoughts were “I feel myself a woman 
and wish to be a man.” Stekel, in his further 
elaboration of my conception of psychic herma- 
phroditism, assumes a double sexual meaning for 
every dream symbol, which I think is a certain 
exaggeration, nevertheless he comes closer to the 
truth than does Freud who denies the regular 
manifestation in the dream of psychic hermaphro- 
ditism and the masculine protest. 

The distinctness with which this first dream of 
our patient points to his feeling of inferiority, so 
to speak, in the form of a reaction to the be- 
ginning of the treatment, is naturally also to be 
understood as an omen for the benefit of the phy- 
sician :— “My disease has its origin in my feeling 
of inferiority.”— ‘My disease,” fainting attacks 
and business incapacity are security devices 
against a defeat in the fifth act. “I am impotent 
and inefficient as a child and long for love, ape- 
love, as I see it in the dream.” We fill out:— 
impotent for reason, in order to be pampered like 
a child, which he succeeds in attaining more read- 
ily after his attacks; and inefficient, in order that 
he may always be supplied with maintenance, in 
order that it may not be forgotten that he must 
be made secure for life through affection and 
legacy. His marked tendency to be frightened 


202 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


by sudden noises, his hyperacusis was especially 
fitted to aid him in gaining his point. The finale 
which he set before him, a desired over-compensa- 
tion for a feeling of inferiority, consisted in not 
more nor less than the desire to gain the love of 
his parents, especially that difficult of attainment, 
mother’s love. Thus he utilizes, with the object 
of influencing his mother’s heart, the already- 
mentioned experiences, such as becoming fright- 
ened upon hearing a shot, as he often manifested 
upon hearing the firing at a military funeral, 
upon hearing the puffing and shrill whistling of a 
locomotive, and during a sudden assault by his 
brother or playmates. The finale which con- 
stantly stands before his eyes, drew upon itself a 
fixation of this hyperacusis, which dominated him 
up to the present. This purposeful hypersensi- 
tiveness serves, as do similar phenomena in hys- 
teria, to show us that the patient’s uncertainty 
forces him to stretch forth his antenne as far as 
possible, as he is actually doing with over-tense 
traits of character. Aside from this his tendency 
to fear pressed upon his masculine feeling and 
gave him the sense of feminine stimuli. He en- 
deavored, therefore, to bring forth in all other 
relations, courage and fearless behavior, in which 
he succeeded too. 

The laying bare of his desire for the love of the 
mother brought forth no particular result. His 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 203 


attacks occurred at about the same intervals, but 
now he had them in bed, in order to protect him- 
self in this way from the possible inroads of the 
treatment, which, at this stage, was encountering 
more difficulty in endeavoring to uncover the 
causes of his attacks. Prior to this the attacks 
occurred always in connection with experiences 
which threatened him with a set-back, but now 
I was compelled to reconstruct these experiences 
from his thoughts and dreams. Naturally the 
patient made a virtue of this necessity, and spoke 
of this change as an improvement due to my 
treatment, thus expecting to gain in this way my 
sympathy, an experience which he always apper- 
ceived as a feeling of power. To this craving 
after this feeling of power he owes his success in 
passing as a very sociable and pleasant fellow in 
his intercourse with strangers. 

It may be spoken here that because of my dif- 
ferent conception of these matters, the Cidipus- 
complex does not come very clearly to the surface, 
here, at any rate not so clearly as Freud has 
demonstrated this complex. To this I would 
have to object energetically. It was this case 
particularly, as so few of them are, which brought 
to view regardless of consequence, the striving 
for the mother in a sexual manner, and the patient 
at no time hesitated to elaborate the frequently 
unconcealed (Edipus dreams as proof of his sex- 


204 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ual striving after his mother. He had many such 
dreams. He dreamed: “I’m walking with a lady 
from our rendezvous towards the street.” 

The lady represented his mother, as the various 
details showed. ‘The “street” referred to prosti- 
tution. ‘The “rendezvous” on the other hand was 
a memory-remnant from his waking life and re- 
ferred to a girl who refused him another meeting, 
thus by her refusal simulating his mother. He 
was unable to wield any influence over girls, and 
was thus, according to his own understanding, 
driven to the masculine—feeling of power—and 
in his protest degraded to the level of a prostitute 
his mother as well as the girl, and for that matter 
all women whom he naturally feared. 

Just as clearly the C(Edipus-complex came to 
light in other dreams, where too the sexual, as a 
jargon, as a mode of speech, was only recognized 
after a penetration into the psychic constellation. 
Thus he dreamed: “I’m sitting at a smooth table 
made of brown wood. A girl brings me a large 
vessel of beer.’ The table reminded him of a 
subterranean cellar at Niiremberg, where he went 
to attend a scientific undertaking which led him 
to the German museum. His thoughts drifted 
in the same general direction of Germanism in 
connection with the large vessel of beer. It is 
quite comprehensible that this unusually musical 
patient should in the analysis come upon Wag- 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 205 


ner’s “Meistersinger.” As he mentioned this he 
began to search for a scene in Wagner’s operas, 
wherein some one takes a drink. At first he 
thought of Tristan, then of Siegfried’s arrival at 
Gunter’s palace. In both scenes the hero drinks 
a love potion. ‘Thus our patient apperceives his 
enigmatical attraction for his mother as some- 
thing provoked by the mother’s magical powers. 
At last he thought of Siegmund whom his sister 
Sieglinde compassionately gives a horn of meal. 

Thus the dream reads:—The voice of blood 
(relation) hath spoken, the mother compassion- 
ately takes his part, he is the hero, who is the man 
(father) of his wife. An incestuous prospect, 
as in Wagner, the patient, as if intoxicated, longs 
after his mother. 

The psychic situation of the patient had 
experienced an “effeminization.” His older 
brother had returned from a journey and was 
welcomed at home with much love. How differ- 
ent were matters upon his own return from his 
travels in Germany. The thought, I am be- 
littled, became accentuated through the reception 
accorded his brother, and ın the dream he seeks 
to save himself through a masculine guiding line. 
It was an attempt which was bound to fail. The 
same night he had a seizure. 

The seizure had for its purpose the direction 
of the mother’s tenderness towards the patient. 


206 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


This was quite successful with the father. But 
even the mother would forget his jealous, fre- 
quently vulgar outbreaks of temper, as soon as 
he lay unconscious, and for a time would sit on his 
bed. Thus he satisfies his wish, his wish to pos- 
sess everything, like the brother, like the father. 
The change of form of his original fiction, namely 
—J] have imperfect genitalia, I will not be a com- 
plete man— had reached the thought, I too wish 
to possess my mother as my father and brother 
possess her. In order to comport himself in this 
matter with the appropriate amount of energy, it 
required a deeply-felt conviction of his longing 
for his mother, which he proceeded to create. 

The most essential reason for his ardent atti- 
tude towards his mother was revealed in the fur- 
ther analysis, which revealed as the decisive point 
his feeling of uncertainty. As the mother iso- 
lated herself more and more from him during his 
childhood, he developed the idea, as is the case 
not infrequently with such children, that he did 
not belong to his family. The fairy tales of 
“Snow White” and “Cinderella” frequently fur- 
nish these children with leading thoughts. When 
his brother was ill once the mother did not leave 
him for a second. Since then the patient was 
uninterruptedly stimulated to test, by means of 
his severe seizures, the family, especially the 
mother, and see if the “voice of blood” will speak. 


AVARICE, SUSPICIOUSNESS, ENVY, ETC. 207 


These tests he carried out with a genuine neurotic 
insatiability, and thus we see also in this case that 
the (Edipus-complex is of the nature of an es- 
pecially arranged fiction, utilized as a means of 
expression for the masculine protest against a 
feeling of uncertainty and inferiority, and de- 
pendent upon the neurotic craving for security, 
the desire to possess everything. 

The inner contradiction which frequently 
comes into being in this form of masculine pro- 
test, the moral condemnation of a conduct corre- 
sponding to the basic thought “to possess every- 
thing,” but also the greater insight into the im- 
possibility of attainment or the fear of a decision 
which may assail the patient often necessitate a 
compromise. ‘This may best be expressed by the 
words “half and half.” The patient seeks a way 
out of this dilemma and thus reaches the point of 
“divide etimpera.’ At times this solution is ten- 
able, because of the possibility of a gratification 
of the desire for dominancy. 

At times this leads to a marked cultural but 
also utopian development of feeling of equality 
and love for justice. 


CHAPTER II 


THE NEUROTIC EXTENSION OF LIMITS THROUGH 
ASCETICISM, LOVE, DESIRE TO TRAVEL, CRIME. 
SIMULATION AND NEUROSIS. FEELING OF IN- 
FERIORITY OF THE FEMALE SEX. PURPOSE OF 
AN IDEAL. DOUBT AS AN EXPRESSION OF PSY- 
CHIC HERMAPHRODITISM. MASTURBATION 
AND NEUROSIS, THE INCEST-COMPLEX AS A 
SYMBOL OF CRAVING FOR DOMINANCY. THE 
NATURE OF THE DELIRIUM. (Delirium used 
in the sense of the French: UNE DELIRE. ) 


A CONSIDERATION which should align itself here 
endeavors to show how the compensating guiding 
idea, “to possess everything” may deviate from its 
straight course in order to stimulate in a round- 
about way or by means of an artifice accomplish- 
ments of a strangely neurotic, criminal, but also 
of a creative kind, in order to reach its ultimate 
good eventually and bring about in some way a 
maximation of the ego-consciousness or at least— 
and to this extent the neurosis remains produc- 
tive—to prevent a degradation. 

The parsimony, penury and asceticism of cer- 


tain neurotics already shows us such a detour 
208 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 209 


upon which the patient permits himself to be 
driven as if he were able to avoid danger only in 
this way. He then behaves strictly according to 
these guiding ideas, believes in them and accen- 
tuates his abnormal being in moments of especial 
uncertainty to the point of a psychosis. In 
melancholic states when poverty phantasies pre- 
dominate, as well as in hypochondriacs, the pa- 
tient in order to avoid the real danger, anticipates 
the feared state, endeavors to realize a fiction, 
emphasizes his feeling of inferiority and utilizes 
his disease for the safeguarding of his ego-con- 
sciousness. Cases exhibiting the lying-mania, 
fetichism, neurotic mania for gathering up things 
and kleptomania, also illustrate this craving to 
possess everything. Another evident trait exists, 
namely, to break through the boundaries laid 
down by reality in the direction of a fictitious 
guiding principle, in order to escape a feeling of 
degradation. Apperception always comes to 
light according to the rigidly formal antithesis of 
“manly-womanly” and frequently leads the pa- 
tient to undertake accentuations by means of 
which it may be proved thatheisaman. Sexual 
symbolism lends itself very well as a means of 
expression for this purpose, the solution of which 
is at times furnished by the exaggerated mascu- 
line trend through peculiar detours. Here be- 
longs the neurotic lying, braggardism, as well as 


210 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


attempts to play with fire and love and thus ex- 
tend as far as possible the established limits. 
Less harmful manifestations are pathological 
wanderlust, the expression of which is to be seen 
in the running away, in the fugues of neurotic 
and psychotic subjects. Asa rule there exists in 
the guiding picture of these neurotics an ideal of 
personality, the apex of which it is attempted to 
reach through imitation or obstinate, negativistic 
behavior. The same trend, namely, to extend 
masculine cognition, to its very limits, is at the 
bottom also of the constant tendency to read 
about, listen to, see and commit acts of a disgust- 
ing nature. 

The more pronounced this striving for worth- 
less possession, the more normal tendencies and 
values are falsified, stmilarly to the manner in 
which love for nature is only a deception, but 
furnished in an exaggerated manner, when a 
tourist wants to have every peak noted upon his 
mountain staff. 

The Leporelist shows us this desire with refer- 
ence to love and the Messalina is to be compared 
with Don Juan, a nymphomaniac who always 
imagines herself unsatiated and belittled because 
in this neurotic form real possibilities for gratifi- 
cation are unattainable. The fettering and deg- 
radation of the partner are of course taken into 
consideration in this relation. 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 211 


“Dear soul, what place can you think of where 
I have not been?” Immermann’s Munchausen 
answers to the question, whether he knew a cer- 
tain distant place. The real satisfaction in active 
games, riding, driving, racing and aviation origi- 
nate, from the desire for possession, for conquest. 
For this reason every child aspires to be a coach- 
man, a conductor, a locomotive engineer or an 
aviator, but to no less an extent he wishes to be 
emperor or teacher in order to command his com- 
panions and to find a visible expression for his 
superiority, or a physician in order to conquer 
death and to extend the limits of life, or a general 
in order to lead an army or an admiral in order to 
command the sea. Lies, thefts and other crimes 
committed by children are manifestly attempts to 
extend the limits of power in this way. For the 
most part these attempts assume no more real 
form than that of day dreams or phantasies. An 
inquiry instituted by me in a girls’ high school 
showed that all of the twenty-five girls remem- 
bered having committed trivial thefts. I was 
able to include even the teacher. On closer ex- 
amination the motive for this striving for attain- 
ment is the intolerable stimulus arising from the 
child’s feeling of inferiority. Frequently the 
child under this pressure is curious, eager to 
learn, seeks to recognize his faults and to make 
for himself a place for unfolding his personality. 


2 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Defects, misfortunes, the feeling of uncertainty 
and inferiority often force a strong development 
of the higher psychic faculties, analogous to the 
compensatory stress in the organic compensatory 
tendency. Jatgeir says in Ibsen’s “Pretender to 
the Crown,” “I received the gift of pain and be- 
came a skald.” It is easy to prove in a number 
of cases that a particularly strong feeling of in- 
feriority sets into activity the impulse to investi- 
gation, or that the “vocation” to the life of an 
artist which later presents the example of a har- 
monious accord of art and life “began with a 
crude dissonance” (B. Litzmann, Clara Schu- 
mann). 

Another way in which children often show 
themselves superior to their parents has been de- 
scribed by me in the “Psychic Treatment of Tri- 
geminal Neuralgia.” This may consist in the 
following: From memory of earlier defects in 
imitation of others, a state of apparent stupidity, 
blindness, deafness, limping, stuttering, enuresis, 
untidiness, awkwardness, lack of appetite, nau- 
sea, etc., is retained. The psyche gradually 
forms out of these already prepared psychic 
habits which the child holds fast to as a protest 
against the feeling of being neglected, psychic 
aptitudes which in the neurosis following a given 
direction, constitute a symptom picture which 
may be stated as follows: Act as if you were 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 213 


obliged to shift for yourself by means of one of 
these faults, of these deficiencies, to gain through 
it a feeling of superiority. The difference be- 
tween this and malingering often consists only in 
this, that in every case it is not always reflection 
which first calls up the phenomenon, but that the 
already existing preparedness for the symptom 
becomes embodied in the web and woof of mem- 
ory as an insuring agent against the fear of being 
under-estimated or neglected, Just as the techni- 
cal skill in the fingers of a virtuoso is always 
ready to respond in the proper reaction to any 
demand. ‘The whole army of neurotic symp- 
toms, blushing, headache, migraine, fainting, 
pains, tremor, depression, exaltation, etc., may be 
traced to these ready-for-use psychic attitudes. 
One of the facts which, thanks to my method of 
viewing the subject, I was able to explain con- 
cerns the less well known feeling of inferiority 
common to all girls and women which is due to 
their feminine role in contrast to the masculine. 
Their soul life is thereby so altered that they con- 
stantly betray traits of the “masculine protest” 
and in truth, usually in a circuitous form, in ap- 
parently feminine inferior traits such as are de- 
scribed in the previously cited group. Educa- 
tion as well as the necessary preparations for the 
future force them to bring their superiority to 
expression, their “masculine protest” in insidious 


214 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ways, mostly having the character of resignation. 
The features of “Emotion” (Heyman’s) are al- 
ways sufficiently distinct, greed for power, envy, 
desire to please, inclination to cruelty are so ap- 
parent that they may be regarded as compensa- 
tory masculine traits, as directed towards a mas- 
culine goal. Parkes Weber (Lancet, 1911) has, 
following me, discovered the foundation of hys- 
terical phenomena in this sort of provision against 
under-estimation. 

Preparedness for crime is also to be regarded 
as an outcome of the masculine protest in persons 
whose compensatory ideal necessitates a fictitious 
guiding line which demands that the life, health, 
and possessions of his fellow man should be 
stripped of worth. In cases of extreme uncer- 
tainty where the deprivations, under-estimations, 
threaten loss of the feeling of ego-consciousness 
as well as where there is strained effort to “reach 
the top,” to secure supremacy, such persons 
(whose feeling of inferiority has sought compen- 
sation in emotional preparedness, in essential 
pursuit of the guiding line, by processes. of ab- 
straction from reality) will seek to come nearer to 
their ideal by a crime. D. A. Jassny has given 
an excellent analysis of this mechanism which is 
manifested most clearly in emotional crimes, ha- 
bitual crimes and crimes of negligence in women, 
in Gross’ Archiv. f. Kriminalanthropologie, 1911. 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 216 


The great importance of the relations of love in 
human life has as a result that the neurotic greed 
to possess everything enters regularly into the 
relations of man and wife and there develops a 
disturbing tendency by introducing an inclination 
to disregard reality and causing the undertaking 
of enterprises with a view to maximation the feel- 
ing of personal worth. It lies in the nature of a 
neurotic to wish to diminish the feeling of inferi- 
ority by constant proofs of his superiority. For 
this reason, the person loved is forced to sacrifice 
the personality, to exist entirely through the neu- 
rotic who makes this demand, to become a means 
for augmenting the feeling of personal worth of 
the neurotic. A good test of a real love without 
neurotic tendency would be the fact that the per- 
son loved was allowed to preserve his or her per- 
sonal worth or when this personal worth even 
received support. Such cases are rare. In the 
relation of the sexes there arises nearly always an 
obstinate and selfish feature, a tendency to put to 
test, towards suspicion which constantly disturbs 
the peaceful marital relations. Arbitrary de- 
mands are the order of the day. One situation 
explains the other, so that the gist of the situation 
can always be easily recognized. It is as if both 
parties were confronted by an enigma which they 
endeavor to solve by every possible means. 
Analysis always reveals a fear of the sexual part- 


216 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ner resulting from a feeling of inferiority and 
thereby striving toward superiority. 

We have already become acquainted to some 
extent with the strivings by circuitous ways where 
there is an accentuated feeling of inferiority in 
congenital defectives. This striving results in 
a number of neurotically acquired adaptations 
and certain traits of character assume promi- 
nence, so that the individual remains in close 
touch with the enemy. Perhaps the really most 
important features are distrust and jealousy, 
with which desire for mastery and disputatious- 
ness are concurrent. According to the previous 
history of the patient and to the previous avail- 
able practices as well as the neurosis which he can 
apply to his purpose, the one feature or the other 
declares itself with more or less distinctness. 
They all stand under the pressure of the fictitious 
final purpose and break forth when reduction of 
the feeling of personal worth is threatened, or 
show that they are still effective when pride re- 
presses them into the unconscious. In all cases 
these individuals have at their disposal the neu- 
rotic adaptations, which now in the form of de- 
pression, again as anxiety at being left alone, as 
fear of places, as insomnia, and in a hundred and 
one other symptoms by means of which they seek 
to force “the opponent” to lay down his arms. 
The strongest moral principles have the same 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 217 


value as, for instance, coquetry and adultery as 
a revenge when the feeling of being under-esti- 
mated demands the reinstatement in equality or 
the gaining of the upper hand of the other party. 
The husband expresses protesting revengeful- 
ness where there is a lack of the feeling of superi- 
ority by playing the wild man, in side leaps, in 
rejection, sometimes however in impotence, in re- 
markable protection of the children or doubts 
about their legitimacy, frequently in shunning 
domesticity, in increased alcoholism or in the pur- 
suit of pleasure. The purpose of this line of con- 
duct is usually so obvious that it is generally un- 
derstood. For it only then reaches its goal when 
the wife feels herself thereby degraded. The 
frequent delirium of jealousy of alcoholics is not 
based on the resulting impotence, but alcoholism, 
impotence and the increased jealousy as a trait of 
character are neurotic forms of expression of 
those predisposed and whose feeling of inferiority 
experiences an aggravation. Like all other neu- 
rotics such an individual suffers from the neurotic 
apperception, by means of which he measures the 
distance of reality from an ideal which has been 
strengthened in the direction of his tendency. It 
is, however, one of the most effective attitudes of 
neurotic individuals to measure pollice verso so to 
speak, real human beings by an ideal, so that 
their value may be reduced to any desired extent. 


218 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The revengefulness of the rejected wife mani- 
fests itself preferably in those neurotic symptoms 
in which frigidity plays the principal role. The 
purpose of this is to contest with the husband, 
the male force, to show him, even where there is 
perfect accord, limits of his power and thus to 
secure a considerable_superiority. 

That this powerful construction is the result of 
an original feeling of deficiency which demands 
compensation becomes apparent from more thor- 
ough analysis. Ordinarily the apperception of 
an under-estimation of an analogous fear or of a 
wish of this nature takes place after the picture of 
the antithesis of “man—woman,” in accordance 
with which the maximation of the ego-conscious- 
ness 1s felt and valued as “masculine,” the lower- 
ing as “feminine.” Or instead of the feeling of 
being under-estimated, in a phantasy or dream of 
a castration (feminine) a loss of the penis arises 
as a symbol. Very often the masculine guiding 
line which had already played an important role in 
the previous history penetrates into the neurosis 
as an essential or accessory component and ac- 
centuates the manly traits as soon as the ego- 
consciousness enters into the question, a circum- 
stance which as a rule is very striking in women. 

Aside from the predisposition to jealousy a 
large number of other symptoms are manifested 
in female neurotics, which originate from the ad- 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 219 


herence to the masculine guiding line. These 
symptoms usually have reference to love or to the 
sexual relation and claim may be made to many 
causes as their foundation, instead of the only 
right one, the desire to be a man, which as far as 
possible seeks realization. This inclination to 
love and “manage” then continues throughout 
the entire life or this form of the masculine guid- 
ing line develops in advanced years an inner con- 
tradiction, a fear of not being able to hold the 
husband, touches the ego-consciousness and 
causes constantly varying neurotic, erotic dis- 
turbances. ‘These variations are dependent on 
the fact that the new guiding line, to win a hus- 
band, in order thereby to elevate the feeling of 
personal worth, contains within itself a contra- 
diction: the lowering of the feeling of personality 
by assuming the feminine role. In such cases 
often the neurotic symptom of indecision awakens 
and extends to the most banal relations of life, 
until the real situation is understood to depend 
upon the hermaphroditic attitude of the subject 
from which the impulse of indecision and doubt 
takes its source. Every decision calls up an an- 
tithetical reaction in the opposing consciousness 
which is then felt and valued after the antithesis 
of “man—woman”’ so that the patient either si- 
multaneously or in immediate sequence plays a 
feminine and then a masculine role. The fol- 


220 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


lowing case may be considered as a visible exam- 
ple of such a condition: 

A girl 30 years of age, who earned her living 
by teaching, complained of uneasiness, constant 
doubt, insomnia and thoughts of suicide. Since 
the death of the father she had taken care of the 
whole family, thus taking the place of the man, 
the provider, and in her phantasies and dreams is 
a beast of burden, a horse that must draw all the 
load. She works until she is exhausted and sac- 
rifices everything to her brother and to her sister. 
As far back as she can remember, she has always 
wished she had been aman. As a child, she had 
sturdy boyish traits and at 15 years of age was 
still mistaken for a boy at bathing places. 

Von Neusser has called attention to these bod- 
ily traits of the opposite sex where constitutional 
anomaly could be shown in his work on the status 
thymico-lymphaticus. Also in my work on neu- 
rology, I have emphasized the finding of bodily 
traits of the opposite sex and could prove con- 
cerning them that they are often made use of by 
neurotics, either for giving prominence to the in- 
feriority in cases where the femininity is accentu- 
ated or for expressing the “masculine protest.” 
The previous observations of Flies who as well as 
Halvan directed my attention to this field, do not 
take into consideration the psychic mechanisms 
as I understand them. 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 221 


In one variety, this female patient revealed the 
masculine protest on the very first day by refus- 
ing sharply gratuitous treatment. She would 
receive no gifts, she repeated emphatically several 
times in succession and she subsequently ex- 
plained to me in the manner with which I was 
already acquainted that it was unmanly to receive 
gifts. Therefore she had always refused them. 
On the other hand, she herself gave willingly, 
something she often practiced in the family in her 
role of father. 

From her history, I emphasize one incident as 
of importance. An uncle had attempted to vio- 
late her in her eighth year. In her terror, she 
had remained passive, but had never mentioned 
the attack. After her neurosis had made some 
progress, she had forced herself to the idea that 
as a child she was already a sinful creature and 
capable of yielding to any one, and that she had 
always remained the same. ‘Thus we have the 
application of a souvenir for the purpose of re- 
assurance with which we are already acquainted, 
for the course of this train of thought was that 
up to her thirtieth year of life she had yielded to 
all men. 

From her tenth year to the twenty-fifth year 
she asserted that she had practiced masturbation 
excessively. She developed therefrom a strong 
feeling of guilt, augmented the conviction of her 


222 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


sinfulness, and arrived at the conclusion that she 
had rendered herself eternally unworthy to enter 
into matrimony. This conviction was bound to 
have an extensive influence on her attitude to- 
ward men. 

The usual role of masturbation in neuroses is 
as follows, that in consequence thereof, an ar- 
rangement of a feeling of guilt arises, but at the 
same time from the possibility of dispensing with 
a partner, the feeling of security from being 
under the influence of a partner. ‘The analogy 
with those cases where the same security is sought 
by strengthening the defects of childhood, enure- 
sis, stuttering or other neurotic symptoms is ob- 
vious. The original feeling of inferiority re- 
mains behind as an echo, fills itself with phan- 
tasies of feminine deficiencies and feelings of 
guilt and forces the individual to strive for the 
manly guiding point. The conduct of our fe- 
male patient is constructed according to the guid- 
ing line which may be expressed in the words, “I 
wish to be a man.” 

A few years ago, a compulsory idea took hold 
of her which clearly reflects our idea of the neuro- 
sis. The patient believed that she had lost 
through masturbation a part of the genital region 
which extended forward and which according to 
her description seemed to her to be a penis. Now 
she had become wholly unfit for marriage, be- 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 223 


cause she could not live through it if her husband 
should hear of her sins. The security seems to 
be thus entirely assured and it is easy to under- 
stand how she brings her fictitious masculine 
guiding principle as an ideal in contrast with 
her real femininity, emphasizes the latter 
and feels inferior, yet by this very expedient 
seeks to exempt herself from a feminine role in 
reality. 

But even this assurance, however strong it 
might seem, became in time insufficient to satisfy 
the ideal of personal value of our patient. Her 
female friends deserted her in order to marry, and 
when finally her younger sister married, her guid- 
ing line became no longer tenable because her 
ambition strove also for “mastery over men.” 
She decided arbitrarily, as nervous girls with ex- 
treme indecision usually do, to take the first best. 
She went to a masquerade where she became ac- 
quainted with a worthy man who wished to marry 
her after a short acquaintance. During a trip 
she yielded to him because, as she said, she feared 
that by contact he might become aware of the 
defect of her genital organs and leave her dis- 
graced and she would rather have anything else 
happen to her. -When later the man in a friendly 
way insisted on her telling him if he were her first 
lover and why she had become so cold she threw 
him overboard with the untruthful explanation 


224 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


that she had had relations with other men. 
Thereupon the man broke off the affair. 

It is easy to imagine what now followed. The 
patient who was already constantly grieving over 
another loss than that of her masculinity, beheld 
herself thwarted and deprived of her new mascu- 
line triumph. She recalled her lie which, as she 
sought to explain to me later, she had told in 
order to punish the man for having conquered 
her, in order to deprive him of worth. She ex- 
plained to him the facts, but he withdrew entirely, 
for the most part from fear of further discords in 
a marriage with this neurotic girl. Thereupon 
our patient became passionately in love with him, 
made a god of him, passed sleepless nights in 
thoughts of him, and took an oath to have him or 
no other husband, for this one was in all human 
probability lost to her. Thus by means of vari- 
ous expedients of her neurosis she had returned to 
her original guiding line, and had gained a ficti- 
tious ideal and up to the time of her treatment, 
had succeeded in avoiding the feminine role. 

In psychotherapeutic treatment, special atten- 
tion should be given to prevent this blindly 
working tendency to depreciation of the patient 
from making the physician himself a victim, as 
the condition of disease is regularly used as a 
means of depriving the psycho-therapeutist of his 
worth. ‘The patient may do this by following the 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 225 


ordinary direction which his disease takes only 
with a sharper tone, because he strengthens the 
symptoms, or originates new ones, and tries to 
supply tense relations, frequently also situations 
of love and friendship, but always with the inten- 
tion (which is the result of his neurotic tendency, 
of the masculine protest) of becoming master of 
the physician, of giving him a setback, of making 
him play a “feminine” part, of annihilating his 
worth. ‘The tactical and pedagogic expedients 
to which one is obliged to resort in order to 
weaken this struggle of the patient against the 
physician, in order to render it comprehensible 
and in order to demonstrate in this way the neu- 
rotic conduct or attitude of the patient in life 
generally, become an important factor in the 
therapeusis. The silent protest of the neurotic 
should not however be undervalued, and one 
should be on the lookout for it to the very end of 
the treatment, laying special stress upon it to- 
wards its termination. It should be viewed with 
quiet, objective composure, as the matter-of-fact 
aggressiveness of the patient and as having the 
same value as has the neurosis, inasmuch as it 
furnishes the neurotic predispositions and traits. 
Freud’s hypothesis of transference will be re- 
ferred to again later. It is nothing more than 
an expedient of the patient who seeks to rob the 
physician of superiority. Bezzola and others 


226 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


have described the circuitous ways in which the 
neurotic patient seeks to deprive physicians of 
their value. It is always the masculine guiding 
line which is revealed, the purpose of which is to 
assure the patient’s superiority. The most usual 
manner of enhancing his tendency to aggression, 
the neurotic finds by holding fast to his symp- 
toms, because these in themselves present a phase 
of his aggressive tendency. 

An extract from a history of a patient shortly 
before the end of her treatment reveals (in the 
form of an unfriendly impulse) this effort to de- 
prive the physician of value as a psychic predis- 
position of her “masculine protest.” The pa- 
tient was placed under treatment because of an 
anxiety and of crying out at night. She was a 
virgin, 36 years of age. I will begin the descrip- 
tion of this neurotic picture with the following 
dream: 


“I was lying at your feet and reached upward 
with my hand trying to grasp your clothes which 
were silk. You made a lascivious gesture, where- 
upon I said laughingly, ‘You are then no better 
than the other men? You confirmed this with a 
nod.” 


Those who, following Freud’s interpretation of 
dreams, place the sexual wish-motive in the fore- 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 227 


ground, will not be at a loss for an interpretation; 
the requirements for a sexual basis for the dream 
were fully supplied. The requirements could 
also be complied with, as the patient had already 
done, by brmging forward a reminiscence from 
childhood, when she solicited her father in a simi- 
lar manner; her neurotic tendency to attain secu- 
rity had indeed carefully collected all admonitory 
experiences, in order to use the man in an “an- 
aphylactic” manner against repetitions. Indeed, 
one could easily get the assent of the patient to 
ascribe to repressed impulses of the will the emer- 
gence of souvenirs of like tendency and the 
present experiences. For her neurotic psyche 
sees such exaggerations as real remembrances and 
makes them her basis of operation, which she does 
by affirming her conviction of inferiority, of her 
fault, of her sin, of her too feminine nature, in 
order to defend with greater vehemence her supe- 
riority, her manliness and to increase her fore- 
sight. This increased masculine protest, how- 
ever, which has its source in the defective perspec- 
tive of the patient who is overfearful, can not but 
naturally increase the neurosis. The destruction 
of this false perspective first (the foundation of 
the neurotic apperception), and the damming up 
of the fictitious influx in the direction of the mas- 
culine protest, and finally a right understanding 


228 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


of the superstitious faith in an abstract guiding 
line and the apotheosis of the same are the levers 
which must be used to remove neurosis. 

Our patient had begun a liaison with a married 
man about the time of this dream. When he 
pressed himself upon her and invited her to his 
house during his wife’s absence at a watering 
place, she was troubled with all sorts of scruples, 
which I strengthened considerably. Neverthe- 
less, she justified the relation and “played with 
the fire” because she said the impatient writhing 
of the man amused her. Incidentally, her way 
of regarding the subject was an inimical act di- 
rected against her relatives and against me her 
monitor. Her own understanding could be in- 
terpreted as a reasonable excuse. But the pre- 
vious history of the patient, and her conduct dur- 
ing her illness which lasted twenty years, and dur- 
ing her treatment, showed plainly that she was 
strongly under the influence of the masculine pro- 
test, and that she could have demanded the sub- 
jugation of the man, but that she must have re- 
fused to play a feminine röle— (she suffered from 
anxiety states and crying out in terror at night). 
The central point of her psychic attitude con- 
sisted in fear of the man to whom she believed she 
was not equal, a fear which she sought to com- 
pensate by her own masculine bearing and by 
the lower estimation of men. 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 229 


After this information concerning the patient, 
we could venture to interpret the dream. She 
exaggerated her physical dependence on me and 
gave this conviction form by clothing it in a 
dream image which is admirably suited for this 
purpose. “As though I lay at your feet.” This 
being “below” was taken as a basis of operation 
and we could rightly expect that the manly im- 
petus would follow the construction of a fictitious 
feminine role. She reached upwards with the 
hands. ‘The contamination contained my depri- 
vation of masculinity. I wore a silk dress. ‘The 
same psychic mechanism hovers in the remaining 
part of the dream. I had admonished the pa- 
tient—in the dream I made a lascivious gesture 
of which the seducer had been guilty, that is to 
say that I am on the same level, “I also am not 
better than the other men.” Besides this to carry 
out the idea further, I was silent and showed 
assent by a gesture in the dream. The opposite 
thought that I could be better is insupportable 
to the patient; from it, which gives me a sort of 
superiority, originates the preventative dream 
fiction constructed after the neurotic perspective. 
The patient only felt secure when all men were 
alike bad. Then she is following her old guiding 
line and feels superior. Her superiority is re- 
flected by her laughing in the dream as well as by 
my silence. 


230 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The circumstance that she began this first dan- 
gerous liason with a married man is worthy of 
attention. In all similar cases, such a relation 
may be recognized as an effort to obtain security 
from marriage, usually also from sexual rela- 
tions. ‘The masculine guiding line is preserved, 
but reality asserts itself by feminine excitements 
and emotions. It is as I have frequently pointed 
out, a masculine protest made with feminine 
means which recalls to me the fact of psychic her- 
maphroditism. Finally, too, the superiority over 
the lawful wife asserts itself in the three-cornered 
arrangement, something which in all analogous 
cases strengthens to an unusual degree the mo- 
tive force. 

If we now proceed as it were to a comparative 
psychology and wish to bring to conscious expres- 
sion the component parts of the foundation of the 
apperception of this patient and put the question 
before us, whence these psychic preparations 
which lead to the attempt of unmanning the man 
by feminine means in order to enhance thereby 
her feeling of worth in a masculine direction and 
to surpass a woman’s, the answer is: From her 
relation to her father and mother. There she 
derived the preparation to approach the father 
with love and esteem as a guiding ideal, learned 
to master him and had thus shown herself su- 
perior to the mother. If one abstracts the mas- 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 231 


culine protest of the neurotic child and if one 
apperceives these conditions (as neurotics often 
do) in a sexual scheme the “incest complex” re- 
mains. One can now, as I have shown in former 
works, take out of the incest complex again what 
the masculine guiding line has placed in it, 
namely, the assurance of the feeling of personal 
worth under the title of an amative condition. 
In the literature on psycho-analysis, the assertion 
emerges constantly that the libido of the neurotic 
is fixed on the father or on the mother, on which 
account he seeks similar amative conditions which 
are in reality that which was loved in the parents. 
The “will to power and to seem” constitutes the 
only amative condition and this guiding point the 
neurotic seeks with all caution, but invariably, 
with all his practiced preventive precautions 
which have originated from and have exclusive 
value from the craving for security and which re- 
sist any change. ‘The significance of the amative 
feeling is no other than the assurance of the ego- 
consciousness, and with this the exclusive influ- 
ence of the same further betrays that the motive 
force there is to be found in the masculine pro- 
test which has already constructed the incest con- 
stellation. Where, as in many cases, the attach- 
ment to one of the parents is clearly obvious, it is 
contracted with a purpose,’ arranged in order to 


1In accordance with the life-plan, the finale. 


232 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


escape decisions concerning other partners, to es- 
cape marriage. ‘Then usually the neurotic has 
destroyed the tendency to love and marriage as 
inconsistent with the masculine final purpose, or 
has not developed it. 

The original of the “three-cornered situation,” 
the incest situation, resolves itself on closer exam- 
ination into an affair caused by the megalomania 
of the child who already reveals all of the charac- 
teristics of one predisposed to neurosis, 1.e., envy, 
obstinacy, insatiableness, precocity. Without 
the sexual appetite really taking part therein, 
thoughts and reflections of the child may come to 
light which are later valued and represented as 
sexual when the neurotic tendency to gain secur- 
ity seeks to make such a connection. “I was al- 
ready as a child, so beyond bounds, so culpable, 
my sexual appetite was so strong, I have such a 
criminal tendency, I am so much the slave of 
love,” these are the echoes in the soul of the adult 
neurotic. “Therefore I must be careful.” ‘The 
impulse to hold to certain appropriate memories, 
to falsifications of memory, to exaggerating 
traces of memories arises from a fear of a defeat 
in life. And where the sexual appetite has really 
been revealed, where the possibility of incest 
really existed, the memory is preserved as an ad- 
monitory sign. ‘That which diverts the neurotic 
psyche is not memory or reminiscence, but the 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 233 


fictitious final purpose which has derived profit- 
able situations therefrom. It is nearly the same 
if these reminiscences have been repressed by the 
conscious ego, thrust back into the unconscious. 
The neurotic character and the other psychic ges- 
tures with their unconscious mechanism are none 
the less opposed to disposition in proper order in 
reality. 

Thus it was in the case of our female patient. 
She related, for example, that she always wished 
to win the father to her side and that she accom- 
plished this by carefully falling in with his train 
of thought and his wishes. It was not difficult to 
leave her mother. From the age of fourteen, she 
began to refuse to kiss him because she began to 
feel a peculiar erotic emotion. In explanation of 
this, I might add that the patient had from her 
twelfth year manifested unmistakable signs of a 
neurosis. Her situation at that time permits us 
to understand the significance of this attempt at 
security—through the construction of erotic prep- 
arations. She had always been an unruly, boy- 
ish creature who had already learned to feel the 
force of the sexual appetite and for some time 
had already practiced masturbation. About this 
time also, men began to make advances to her to 
which she reacted with extreme anxiety. Her 
craving for security had progressed so far that 
the patient had strengthened the anxiety prepar- 


234 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


edness which had been constructed out of real 
emotions of anxiety which she had originally felt, 
and now she was able, whenever she feared a de- 
feat in the sense of being obliged to play a fem- 
inine röle, any possible cause of which she was on 
the alert to anticipate, to develop in a hallucina- 
tory manner, a condition of anxiety, so to speak, 
discount it, such as would have corresponded for 
example to the eventuality of pregnancy. This 
anticipation and hallucinatory awakening of sen- 
sations which correspond to a fear of defeat which 
might arise in the future are the work of the pre- 
ventive craving for security and constitute, as I 
have already emphasized,” the essential part of 
hypochondria, of phobia and of numerous neuras- 
thenic and hysterical symptoms. I will only 
state briefly here that the essential part of a psy- 
chosis, too, depends upon a similar dogmatic an- 
ticipatory representation of a fear or a wish, 
which the craving for security offers for the better 
testimony in a phase of great insecurity, in strong 
dependence on the fictitious guiding line for the 
conservation of the ego-consciousness. When 
our patient foresaw a loss of prestige and pro- 
vided against it by a condition of anxiety in a hal- 
lucinatory manner she felt most secure against it. 
At times, the hallucinatory emotion needed a fur- 
ther strengthening, then the patient arrived at 
2 “Siphilidophobia,” loc. cit. 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 235 


the compulsory idea that she had killed a new 
born child. In the analysis this idea in regard 
to the man, at times a place anxiety, was shown to 
be connected with an admonition of her mother’s. 
This signifies that the patient rescued from her 
memories even the words of her mother whom 
she constantly fought against, in so far as these 
words were adapted to her tendency to seek se- 
eurity.” 

Among these preparatory conditions an event 
occurred which favored greatly the hardy con- 
struction of these preparations for security. One 
of her cousins gave birth to a child out of wedlock, 
a fact which, in a family of respectable mid- 
dle class people, caused the greatest excitement, 
especially as the seducer shook the dust of the 
place from his feet. Our growing understand- 
ing for the development of this girl permits us to 
understand why this event must have accelerated 
the development of the neurosis and how it came 
that the words of the mother to whom she ordi- 
narily showed little attention were given such 
importance. The patient was from her early 
childhood wild and boyish and of great strength, 
preferred boys’ games and avoided every femi- 
nine emotion. She can still remember with what 
vehemence she. refused to play with dolls or to 


3 Along with this the mother should also be at fault with her 
apodictic threats. 


236 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


engage in needlework. The personality of the 
father preponderated over that of the mother to 
a remarkable degree. An unmarried aunt who 
lived with the family of our patient took pleas- 
ure in her masculine manners, had a beardlike 
growth of hair and a masculine voice. To this 
strong and constantly recurring memory was as- 
sociated another event of later occurrence and 
which furnished the necessary resonance to the 
dominating tendency of the patient to wish to 
become aman. She remembered that one of her 
fellow scholars with whom she had long been as- 
sociated—a pseudo hermaphrodite—was changed 
into aman. These and similar communications 
—for example, the special interest for hermaph- 
roditism, are sufficient according to my experi- 
ence for the preliminary assumption that patients 
of this sort wish to divest themselves of the ap- 
pearance of femininity, and wish to assume mas- 
culine characteristics, as though they fully be- 
lieved in the possibility of a metamorphosis and 
that they invariably make an attempt to push 
forward to the manly role which is considered by 
them to be the higher. Among these attempts to 
change fate two interest us particularly—the for- 
mation of the neurotic character and the neu- 
rotic preparations in the form of the neuroses and 
their symptoms. 

As a trait of character which is not rare with 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 237 


such patients, I may cite the tendency to expose 
nakedness, and indeed in childhood or in later 
years, in dreams, in phantasy or in neurotic at- 
tacks during which they tear the clothes from the 
body as though they would divest themselves of 
the modesty which they regard as feminine, as 
though they wished to make a parade of fictitious 
large masculine genital organs and thus belittle 
others. It may be seen from these cases how one 
perversion, that of exhibitionism, does not origi- 
nate from a congenital sexual constitution, but 
that the neurosis which seeks to secure the ego- 
consciousness is impelled to suppress the feeling 
of inferiority, to overcome it because in this neu- 
rosis the lively desire to be a complete man, to be 
of great account, finds expression. The sexual 
jargon is there—in merely a form of expression 
an “as-if” of the sexual content of the thought 
or want, only a symbol of the scheme of life. 
Also the feminine, exaggerated modesty of such 
patients is an expedient in the opposite direction 
for the purpose of deceiving concerning the lack 
of masculinity.* The absence of modesty in such 
cases answers for the desired masculinity, is the 
masculine protest, and more marked immodesty 
points invariably to disquieting dreams or 
thoughts concerning curtailed genital organs and 
hence releases feelings of protest of a masculine 


4 Adler—The masculine attitude in female neurotics, etc. 


238 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


nature which considerably strengthen the line of 
ambition, of the desire to be first, to possess every- 
thing, of obstinacy. In the further development 
of the neurosis the desire for mastery and for 
conquest as well as the tendency to deprive others 
of worth may assert itself in the form of castra- 
tion phantasies and their rationalization (Jones). 
The inclination to disarm the partner, to con- 
stantly feel the assurance of superiority which 
regularly constitutes the content of exhibitionism 
are often met with. At times, the lack of neat- 
ness and indecency in girls may be interpreted as 
a trace of the desire for masculinity. 

All of these traits of character although they 
at times seemed contradictory were all active in 
one direction toward the fictitious final goal in 
this patient. It was not difficult to discover a 
period of uncertainty in her early childhood as 
preliminary to her affectation of masculine traits, 
where she, because of lack of insight, misled by 
boyish traits and her compensatory ambition, 
cherished the hope of metamorphosing herself at 
some future time intoaman. ‘This final purpose 
of developing from a hermaphroditie condition 
to a male is easy to perceive if her boyish charac- 
teristics are understood as preparations for her 
fictitious final goal. Here also belongs her in- 
clination to put on boys’ clothes, a phenomenon 
which as with Hirschfeld’s “Transvertiter” 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 239 


flows from the psychic dynamic just described. 
Her ideal was particularly distinct in the phan- 
tasies and day dreams of her childhood. Influ- 
enced by fairy stories and myths (“Dwarf Nose,” 
“Thousand and One Nights,” etc.) she imagined 
the most varied changes went on in her, some- 
times believed herself changed into a Nix or mer- 
maid, in which form a fish tail terminated the 
lower parts of the body, which is indicative of 
the peculiar sense. At this time a distinct neu- 
rotic symptom set in, in this connection; she could 
not walk at times, as if, instead of legs, she had 
a fish tail. Also a shoe fetichism in this connec- 
tion showed the masculine tendency and devel- 
oped in the form that she insisted on wearing 
large shoes, we might say masculine shoes, be- 
cause her feet hurt. From Ovid’s Metamorpho- 
sis which in her rage for reading soon fell into 
her hands, she borrowed another fiction which 
emerged during her treatment in her dreams; she 
imagined she had been metamorphosed in such a 
way that the lower part of her body became a 
firmly rooted trunk. In this and in similar ways, 
she gave to herself the answer to the question 
concerning her future sexual role. 

We will not be surprised to find that in this and 
similar cases, the attitude towards woman was 
also influenced by the masculine final goal. In 
the preparations for the future the amative and 


240 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


sexual relations must have had a place and there- 
fore we soon find our patient assuming the ideal 
masculine role of protector to a younger and 
weaker sister. Furthermore, there were sadistic 
acts towards little girls and servants, but also 
towards little, girlish boys. Thus we find in the 
masculine guiding line of the patient an intermix- 
ture of secondary features, auxiliary traits of 
homosexuality ° and masculine sadism, whose ar- 
rangement resulted from the construction of the 
masculine predispositions and which is the only 
possible substitute if masculine sexuality were se- 
lected by her neurotic apperception from the im- 
pressions of life. As will be shown, both of these 
perversions are circuitous ways and expedients, 
secondary guiding lines which grow out of the ex- 
aggerated masculine protest. ‘The question con- 
cerning a constitutional tendency to perversions 
is wholly irrelevant, because the neurosis seeking 
assurance and choosing its material in conform- 
ity with this tendency can fasten upon the most 
harmless relations, lend to them proportions and 
value which may become immeasurable in so far 
as the neurosis requires this by exaggerating 
them and lending them high values. 


5 Moll has emphasized sharply the frequent association of homo- 
sexuality with exhibitionism. Our discussion reveals the inner re- 
lationship. Both perverse tendencies are expressions of the mas- 
culine protest. 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 241 


One day as the patient, now fourteen years of 
age, was accosted by a man on the stairs who 
made advances to her, an insane idea developed 
on this foundation which is easy to see through. 
She imagined herself for many months the mur- 
derer of domestic servants (Hugo Schenk) and 
thus by means of extreme abstractions which were 
introduced for the purpose of security, she ef- 
fected an interlacing of her masculine, her homo- 
sexual and her sadistic fiction, while she brought 
them to more distinct expression and at the same 
time held herself in anticipation of an event which 
she feared. These three conditions, mere ab- 
stractions from reality, strengthening of guiding 
lines leading to masculinity and upwards, and 
anticipation of the directing ideal mostly in a dis- 
guised form, are the fundamental components of 
the psychotic construction. The role of indige- 
nous and exogenous poisons consists in many 
cases in the circumstance that these call up a feel- 
ing of heightened insecurity which can also result 
from psychic experiences. But the neurotic 
tendency toward security, which is strengthened 
in cases of increased uncertainty, is always the 
effective cause of the psychotic construction. It 
then draws more forcibly into its power the neu- 
rotic method of apperception and thus causes a 
“barring off” (absperrung). "The use of female 
domestic servants in the psychic construction of 


242 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


our patient brings to expression the tendency to 
depreciation of females. In her insane system 
anxiety is strongly manifested and is distinctly 
recognizable as a means to obtain security against 
the male and thus coördinated to the purpose of 
her insanity constituting a second expression of 
her aggravated masculine protest.° 

A further perversion of our patient of which 
she was dimly conscious consisted in a fellatio 
phantasy. The realities connected therewith and 
which found application in the neurotic tendency 
of her phantasy were well known to the patient. 
She had always been very dainty and as a child 
had always been a slave to this tendency. Even 
to-day this characteristic often asserts itself. 
But it happened not infrequently that she took 
loathsome things into her mouth without disgust. 
In her avoidance of the feminine role this pa- 
tient tried, because parturition seemed to her un- 
acceptable and especially feminine, to imagine 
this perverse situation temporarily possible. 
The suggestion originated from a conversation 
which she had overheard. ‘This perversion was 


6 The accentuation of the fictitious guiding line in the neurotic 
who becomes insecure is responsible for the fact that he has to 
utilize stronger measures for the purpose of gaining security. 
Anxiety where another merely visualizes, hypochondriasis where 
another employs caution. Our patient had both the anxiety and 
the delusion where for other girls morality and caution were still 
sufficient. Thus also in place of caution, hallucinations, and fears. 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 243, 


asserted of a female neighbor living independ- 
ently and in pleasant relations. Early forced 
away from the partner, she nevertheless sought 
to keep in touch with reality and found in the 
avoidance of labor, supported by her exaggerated 
leaning to disgusting procedures the way to this, 
perverse phantasy. But her masculine protest 
opposed even this. Her crying out at night was 
as a rule over dream situations of this sort, ar- 
ranged tentatively, and with this masculine pro- 
test, she answered to the femininely perverse role 
which she imputed to herself. 

The psychic attitude of the patient described 
at the beginning shows the essential difference. 
At least a part of her fear of the man and of the 
masculine protest was present which after a short 
time made room for a normal attitude. ‘What 
could make one apprehensive was the disposition 
to a difficult, socially inferior situation which 
could only be obviated by further inroads. 
Could there, however, be expected a much more 
favorable solution of the problem of this patient 
who has declined and who has been robbed of all 
social connections by the long duration of the 
neurosis, and is destitute? 

With all the solidity and obstinacy which cling 
to neurotic symptoms and the neurotic character 
there is often a changeableness and instability 
which has attracted the attention of many writ- 


244 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ers. The character of capriciousness, of uncer- 
tainty of temper, of suggestibility and of suscep- 
tibility to influence (Janet, Strümpell, Raimann 
and others) was wrongly given as an important 
sign of a psychogenic affection. But attention 
must, however, be called to the fact that in psychic 
phenomena which, as. we have shown, only present 
means, modes of expression and purposeful dis- 
positions, variability must often be preserved 
among the other characteristics, because it may 
also occur as an auxiliary line and serve the ficti- 
tious final goal, the maximating of the ego-con- 
sciousness. The neurotic self-valuation will at 
any rate take those variations as a point of de- 
parture for a way of thinking, will exaggerate the 
judgment of weakness by strengthening the sug- 
gestibility, will support it with selected neuroses 
for the most part falsely estimated in order to 
gain in a neurosis a strengthened impetus. As 
the following case teaches for example. A short 
time ago, a Viennese physician brought forward 
in a public session, examples of making waking 
suggestions which indeed succeeded with a certain 
lady on a few evenings. When the same lady 
was expected to offer herself again for a demon- 
stration on a subsequent evening she responded 
with an hysterical attack of such nature that the 
further demonstrations were forbidden by the 
police. In the psychotherapeutic treatment, one 


ASCETICISM, LOVE, ETC. 245 


must always be prepared for the circumstance 
that the introduction of the patient into the ex- 
periment heightens the masculine protest and the 
disposition to attacks and is above all forced to 
prevent this reaction. Every improvement in 
the condition is felt by the patient as compulsion 
and conquest and a relapse often follows from no 
other reason than that an improvement had pre- 
ceded. The many ambivalent traits of neurotics 
and psychotic patients arranged according to a 
polar principle (Bleuler) are constructed on the 
hermaphroditie splitting of the neurotic psyche 
and obey exclusively the ideal of personal worth 
reassured by hypersensibility and great caution. 


CHAPTER III 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES: SYMPATHY, COQUETRY, 
NARCISSISM, PSYCHIC HERMAPHRODITISM, 
HALLUCINATORY SECURITY, VIRTUE, CON- 
SCIENCE, PEDANTRY, FANATIC ATTACHMENT 
TO TRUTH 


In our preceding observation we were able to 
follow the various attempts, preparations and 
dispositions of a patient which were conditioned 
by the setting in of the masculine tendency. The 
resulting fear of the man was so great that every 
amative relation was prevented until treatment 
made it possible. In very many cases the mascu- 
line protest manifests itself in an apparently op- 
posite direction. ‘The patients constantly begin 
new relations which, however, easily languish and 
are menaced by peculiar turns of fortune. On 
the other hand, they are capable of contracting 
marriage one or more times and also of dissolving 
the marriage again. Very often the deepest pas- 
sions of love are shown which are strong enough 
to overcome all obstacles and are usually only 
augmented by them. ‘The same phenomeha are 


observed in male neurotics. Upon closer obser- 
246 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 247 


vation the well known traits of the neurotic sub- 
ject are again found (first of all the desire for 
mastery) which make use of the relations of life 
as a vehicle for realizing themselves demonstrably 
in the same manner as do his other characteristics. 
The desire to possess everything finds expression 
in such a way that all men, at times, all human 
beings, become an object for conquest and in pur- 
suing this object, coquetry, necessity for tender- 
ness, and discontent with the lot assigned by fate, 
play an important part. The preference for 
difficulties is often remarkable. A little girl pre- 
fers only big men, or love first declares itself when 
the parents forbid it, while the attainable is 
treated with open disdain. In the conversation 
and deliberation of such girls the limiting word 
emerges constantly. They wish only a cultured, 
only a broad, only a masculine man, only a pla- 
tonic love, only a marriage without children, only 
a husband who will permit their entire liberty, etc. 
The tendency toward detraction is often so obvi- 
ous in this process that hardly a man remains who 
would fit the requirements. Usually they have 
a completed, often unconscious ideal, in whom 
are mingled the features of the father, the 
brother, an imaginary personage, or a literary or 
historical character. ‘The more we become ac- 
quainted with these ideals, the more are we con- 
vinced that they are advanced as a fictitious 


248 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


standard in order to detract from reality by com- 
parison with them. The psychic tendency with 
the accompanying features of an “unwomanly” 
nature, which frequently gives rise to sexual lib- 
erty, unfaithfulness and unchastity, reveals ob- 
viously a striving after the masculine ideal. 
Analysis often shows original organic inferiority, 
an exaggerated feeling of inferiority, a remark- 
able original higher estimation of the male which 
follows on the heels of detraction as a means of 
assurance. Other assurances strengthen the 
opinion we have formed. Such ideas as, all men 
are rough, tyrannical, have a bad odor, are in- 
fected, etc., reveal the influence upon appercep- 
tion of this trend. In male neurotics are ob- | 
served ideas of a suspicious nature which make 
the accusation that all women are sinful, un- 
stable, frivolous, psychologically weak-minded, 
abandoned unrestrainedly to their sexuality. 
Our teachers, philosophers and poets, who 
form the ideal of our time, the Secret Emperor 
(“heimlichen Kaiser”) (Simmel), are also not 
infrequently under the sway of the same fictions. 
The neurotic is therefore likely to seize upon 
them in order to gain a firm guiding line in the 
unrest of life. For the above neurotic tendency, 
Schopenhauer, Strindberg, Moebius, and Wein- 
inger, besides the religious teachers and fathers 
of the church, have produced the most pleasing 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 249 


cleiché. 'The malleus malificarium and the dis- 
grace of the burning of witches followed the 
learned disputes of the clerics over the question 
whether woman has a soul, whether she is a hu- 
man being. ‘The reassuring schematic fictions of 
neurotic girls are derived from a childish view 
of the world because art is still, nearly exclu- 
sively, masculine territory and the apperception 
offers a material less suited to it, and therefore 
these fictions of neurotic girls are brought into 
harmony with reality with greater difficulty. 
Where reality, however, is able to influence 
the neurotic fiction of the girl it usually causes 
traits of character and tendencies which reveal 
clearly enough the masculine inclination to con- 
quer man, or where there is the strongest tend- 
ency to gain security—in a homosexual way—to 
conquer woman, but which make these neurotics 
nevertheless seek, as a lover or as a husband, the 
man to whom she denies value and who is only 
fitted in a small degree for conflict. The expres- 
sion of sympathy can in such cases often disguise 
the state of affairs, and love is then free if the 
man is powerless, enfeebled, a cripple, aged. In 
phantasies, dreams and hallucinations in which 
the man is castrated or changed into a woman, 
or corpse, is “below,” and especially in the tend- 
ency to see the man without weapons, small, 
abased; is revealed the compulsion of the mascu- 


250 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


line guiding fiction and finds in necrophilia its 
highest expression." Another road, as we have 
already stated, leads over the line of the desire 
to possess everything, towards neurotic coquetry. 
The masculine protest is therein revealed, first in 
the tendency to compensate a feeling of infe- 
riority, of deficiency apperceived through the 
picture of the lost masculine member by means 
of domination of many or of allmen. Secondly, 
by the refusal of a feminine röle in sexual rela- 
tions, in marriage. In place of this despised 
role, expedients are resorted to which are dic- 
tated by the manly guiding line, such as sexual 
anesthesia and perversions of all sorts, among 
which the sadistic predominates. Bloch has em- 
phasized in a fine manner the desire for domina- 
tion by the coquette when he says: (“Beitrage 
zur Atiologie der Psychopathia sex,” 1903) “Co- 
quetry, which may be defined as the effort of 
women to attach men to them, makes use, to a 
considerable extent, of purely sexual means to 
attain its object, and is, in this respect, an efflux 
of the true gynecokratic instinct.” We can only 
add that these “gynecokratic instincts” are con- 
structed according to the picture of the resem- 
blance to men and thus prove themselves to be 
dependent on a masculine ideal although in the 


1 Eulenburg emphasized in the same manner the relationship be- 
tween active algolagnia (v. Schrenck-Notzing) and necrophilia. 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES gol 


attainment thereof feminine means are resorted 
to as expedients because they are the only ones 
at hand. The attention and interest of these 
neurotics (among whom the masculine coquettes 
are remarkable because they seek to carry 
through their triumph valued as masculine by 
feminine means) is directed towards making an 
impression and to force others into their service. 
A result of this trait of character is that the neu- 
rotic strengthening of these secondary guiding 
lines leads to overestimation of self and there- 
fore also to exaggeration of the desire for mas- 
tery, of pride, and of the tendency to detract 
from the worth of others. Hence we need not be 
surprised that the object of the desire, as a rule, 
appears to be overvalued through the narcissism 
(Naecke) of the patient. This overestimation 
is rather an a priori condition in the construction 
of the relation and in it is reflected the exagger- 
ated ego of the female patient.’ 

In the psychotherapeutic treatment these 
cases produce especially the appearance of “be- 
ing in love with the physician.” It may, how- 
ever, be easily seen that this “transfer of love” 
corresponds to one of the numerous preparations 
for conflict used for overcoming the obstacle and 
thus to get the better of the superiority of the 


2 The belief in personal magic is so strong that every resistance 
leads to new endeayors. 


252 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


man, of the masculine physician; and it may be 
easily seen that the feeling of deficiency which 
calls forth this peculiar obscure form of the mas- 
culine protest springs from their femininity 
which they feel as inferiority. In no case, how- 
ever, no matter how far the neurotic may carry 
coquetry, does it reach far enough to include sub- 
jection to the man. Sooner or later the man is 
threatened with defeat which carries with it loss 
of dignity, and in fact, always when the neurotic 
patient feels the situation to be too feminine. 
This moment may arrive at different stages but 
it is as a rule, contact, a kiss, expectation of sex- 
ual relations, fear of pregnancy or of childbirth 
which releases the heightened tendency to gain 
reassurance and causes the outbreak of that 
which is ordinarily termed a neurosis or psy- 
chosis. Then the stronger abstraction of reality 
comes into its right, the fictions assert themselves 
with greater distinctness, the tendency to detract 
from the value of the man leads to actions and 
deeds which apparently have lost all meaning, 
and the inimical dispositions of the aggressive- 
ness, and with these the neurotic traits of char- 
acter come to light. 

Every neurotic possesses to some degree this 
coquetry which has its origin in narcissism. 
They originate indeed from his hypostasized idea 
of personal value and is founded like this upon 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 253 


an original feeling of inferiority. ‘The fact that 
neurotics, especially the species just described, 
find it so hard to separate themselves from per- 
sons or things is in harmony with this. The 
parting from a person, seemingly not in close re- 
lations with the neurotic, to say nothing of a 
seemingly loved person, is capable of producing 
the most severe neurotic symptoms, neuralgic 
attacks, depression, loss of sleep, attacks of weep- 
ing, etc. On the other hand, threats of deser- 
tion or separation are not rare and are used to 
bring forth proof of the influence over the person 
threatened. ‘That the masculine protest is domi- 
nant in this coquetry is proved from various phe- 
nomena. ‘The strong disinclination for a dis- 
tinctly feminine role has already been empha- 
sized; it is capable in these cases of calling forth 
a remarkable picture, the appearance of a double 
life—a splitting of consciousness, an ambiva- 
lence (Bleuler). Analysis constantly furnishes 
greater proof for the striving toward masculin- 
ity. Dreams, phantasies, hallucinations, onset 
of psychosis show in a most distinct manner the 
striving to become a man, or one of the equiva- 
lents, as fear of a feminine lot. The strong 
tendency toward detraction of men originates 
from the effort to attain an equal value with the 
male and gives rise in sexual events to the mas- 
culine röle, which is revealed in frigidity, in de- 


254 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


sire to be first and in those perversions which 
force the man to take a slavish and debasing po- 
sition. 

Often the onset of the neurosis may be as- 
sumed to have set in when such symptoms as fear 
of a decision, of a test, of marriage, public ap- 
pearance, of place (Platzangst), require medi- 
cal treatment. These anxieties arise at the 
emerging of a contradiction in the masculine pro- 
test, if in pursuing the same a set-back, a femi- 
nine lot, a defeat is threatened and hence the 
forced admission of femininity. 

This was the case with one of my patients who, 
several years ago, just before her first public ap- 
pearance, became ill with piano-player’s cramp. 
This neurosis furnished a good excuse for escap- 
ing from a dreaded failure. The closer exami- 
nation into the conditions of this illness showed 
a neurotic illusion in which the patient at the 
sight of notes was reminded of male genital or- 
gans. The first explanation to suggest itself 
was that of an exaggerated or repressed sexuality 
whose reflection in the piano-player’s cramp was 
to.be sought in the repression of the inclination 
to masturbation. ‘The result furnished an en- 
tirely different explanation. The triumph be- 
fore the public was supposed to signify an equal- 
ity with the man, masculinity. This fiction was 
in contradiction with reality, with her femininity, 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 255 


so that a public appearance equaled a final bal- 
ancing of the facts (many talented girls and 
women are wrecked for the same reason). The 
sense of reality of the patient placed instead 
of the facts would not admit this condition of 
things, and arranged by a symbolic interpreta- 
tion of the heads of the notes works a fictitious 
abstraction which recalled the femininity and be- 
came a regressive signal. The contradiction in 
the masculine protest of this patient is mani- 
fested, as is nearly always the case in the neu- 
rosis, in the unrealizability of the fiction just 
when before the decision the possibility of a fail- 
ure estimated as “feminine” in character emerged 
—a common phenomenon which needs no expla- 
nation. Now the traits of anxiety, of shyness, 
of stage-fright are strengthened and they either 
themselves furnish excuses or preparations and 
predispositions (in our case pains and inability 
to move the hands) and divert the attention from 
the menace to the masculine protest. But in this 
case also the force of the masculine protest is as- 
tonishing, it forms a preparedness for con- 
flict in the direction of the masculine protest even 
out of the illness in which the patient takes ref- 
uge. This girl had entered upon the career of a 
virtuoso against her will, forced thereto by her 
unyielding mother. The wrecking of her moth- 
er’s ambitious plans meant for the daughter a 


256 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


victory which recompensed her in part. That 
which her obstinacy, her masculine tendency was 
not able to accomplish, was successful through 
her illness as soon as note-stems called up to her 
the menacing souvenir “you are a woman, take 
care, do not allow yourself to be forced to a femi- 
nine obedient röle by your mother—conquer her.” 
A further construction, an excuse which yielded 
a foundation for the attitude toward her mother, 
lay in the heightened feeling that her younger 
sister was given preference. This train of 
thought, as well as her efforts to gain exclusive 
control over every one, her mother, all the mem- 
bers of the family, all human beings in the en- 
vironment, even of a dog, was reflected in the 
heightened characteristics of her coquetry and 
found expression, for example, in one of her 
latest dreams concerning the physician. The 
dream was as follows: 


“I sit opposite you and ask if you like all the 
patients as well as you like me. You answered, 
‘Yes, all, and my four children, too” All at once 
you changed into a woman and went to sleep. A 
woman was looking at the black notes.” 


The amative disposition of this patient could 
endure no rival. She made use of the certainty 
of her conquest in order to support her feeling 
of security. The physician who gave her to un- 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 257 


derstand that he treated all patients with the 
same interest, and who loved his children besides, 
becomes forthwith the point of attack of her 
striving for domination, as was formerly the 
mother, the man whom she married, as were all 
persons in her environment, domestic servants, 
trades-people, teachers, etc. Her self-centered 
nature did not need to “transfer,” as she came to 
the treatment with rigid predispositions and put 
them in play from the first moment of her meet- 
ing with the physician. Only the new situation 
was surrounded with difficulties and obstacles 
which prevented the will to domination through 
love from fully developing. Naturally my wife 
was left out of the dream. Just this omission is 
the cornerstone of the situation; my wife is defi- 
nitely set aside. Up to this point the feminine 
means extend and characterize the feminine line 
to which the patient holds. Now the masculine 
protest emerges more distinctly. I become un- 
manned, the reassuring illusion of the patient, 
namely, the notes as a protecting symbol of the 
male genitals, asserts its right. She, herself, 
“takes care,” secures herself in order not to sink 
in her feeling of masculine ego-consciousness, to 
suffer no defeat. 

That I go to sleep in the dream, assigns to me 
a place similar to that which her husband occu- 
pies. ‘The patient feels it as a great neglect that 


258 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


her husband, an overworked manufacturer, often 
goes to sleep before she does. The unmanning 
of the husband is the answer thereto, as well as 
a prolonged insomnia whose constructive signifi- 
cance lies in the fact that it permits the patient 
to operate against her husband. Now she could 
refuse him his right as a husband and turned him, 
at first in the middle of the night, later perma- 
nently, out of her bedroom; because he “snored 
and disturbed her so much.” Our patient would 
have easily found another argument if this one 
had not presented itself, and it would be errone- 
ous to exclude the neurotic construction as a 
cause because in this case the neurotic happened 
to be right. In order to prove that she is right 
the patient will often argue aptly; the neurotic 
stigma in fact consists in the tendency to render 
the superiority visible by all possible means. 
Litigious paranoia for example reveals this 
mechanism to us with greater clearness. Be- 
sides, the neurosis of our patient continues in its 
construction of assurances. To her insomnia is 
added, in order to place this on a firmer basis, a 
sensitiveness of hearing, whose mechanism con- 
sists in an overcharging of the attention for the 
purpose of serving the neurotic tendency, so that 
we were also able to say, by this overcharging, 
the patient is awakened by the slightest noise as 
soon as she falls asleep. ‘Thus she can, still awake 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 259 


when morning comes, sleep far into the day and 
thus avoid the feminine tasks of the household, 
in the same manner as she had escaped the moth- 
er’s domination by stage fright and cramps in the 
fingers. An auditory hallucination, a sawing 
noise, constitutes a final security which may be 
pursued analytically in two directions. ‘The one 
interpretation is furnished by a warning souvenir 
which at the same time is an incentive to her co- 
quetry—once, when eight years old, she over- 
heard an intimate scene at her married sister’s, 
she felt shut out, neglected—she gave a similar 
value to her husband’s “indifference” when he fell 
asleep before she did, in order to be able to take 
a sharply aggressive attitude toward him. A 
second interpretation led in another direction. 
The noise recalled the sawing off of a stem and 
symbolized, acoustically,? the unmanning, the de- 
traction from the worth of the man. As is also 
so frequently the case this symptom proved to be 
(just as I have maintained of the dream, of 
symptoms, and of the neurosis) a representative 
instance of the ascension from the feminine to 
the masculine line, as a masculine protest against 
a situation usually previously felt as feminine, 

3 One is reminded here of the somatic-jargon of which we have 
already spoken. Thus the words, “schrill” and “grell,” bring to 
expression sensorially in their transformed meaning, analogies 


which are felt at one time through the eye, at another, through 
the ear. 


260 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


against an anticipated feeling of defeat and as a 
symbol of the life scheme of this neurotic pa- 
tient. 

This, and similar cases, explained to me in 
what manner suggestibility became an auxiliary 
of the tendency to attain security, either because 
therefrom the patient gained in small things the 
conviction of her weakness in order to provide 
herself with proper protection at critical times, 
or because the patient yields with surprising plia- 
bility in order to gain ascendancy over the other 
person.* The more direct efforts of her tend- 
ency to domination stand so sharply in contrast 
with this yielding that when only superficially 
observed the phenomenon resembles a splitting 
of consciousness. In the same manner, vanity, 
pride, and self-admiration will guide the patient 
in many cases to the same goal, while she at 
times, conducts herself with modesty, simplicity, 
and carelessness, using these qualities as expedi- 
ents. Usually externals and attitudes are care- 
fully studied. Very often fetichism is mani- 
fested, whose essential and constructive founda- 
tion represents efforts to prove equality with men 
in circuitous ways, hence to compensate for a 
feeling of deficiency. Literature furnishes us 

4'The latter mechanism seems to be at the root of passive homo- 


sexuality while both attitudes may be taken as the structure of 
masochism, still better, pseudomasochism. 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 261 


with representations of all these efforts in a most 
refined form in the memoirs of Baschkirzewa and 
Helen Rakowiza. Analyses of a series of cases 
where the memories of these remarkable impres- 
sions from childhood had been preserved more 
vividly than usual furnished me with interesting 
verifications at a time when I was already far 
advanced in my exposition of the doubts about 
the future sexual röle on the part of the neurotic 
child and the masculine protest which necessarily 
springs therefrom. Some remembered very dis- 
tinctly having been in doubt up to the twelfth or 
thirteenth year whether they were male or fe- 
male. It may not be a matter of chance that 
these were male patients. At times the doubt 
emerged whether they were not hermaphrodites, 
so that I am inclined to think that in other cases 
where the thought of hermaphrodites was dis- 
tinctly and importunately present in the memory 
of the patient and was spontaneously brought 
forward, it is the last impression of a doubt about 
the patient’s own sex. And in literature, too, I 
have frequently run across this significant trace 
in the histories of neurotics and psychotics with- 
out the significance of this doubt concerning the 
sexual role being clear to the writers. Meschede 
described an interesting case of question-compul- 
sion (Fragezwang), and Freud one of dementia 
after Schreber’s biography. I disregard whether 


262 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


or not this interest of the patient was explained 
by illustrations, or placards, in the lexicon, by 
readings by spectacles, by occurrences, as well as 
the scientific interpretation which seemed to con- 
centrate its attention to the male periods, the 
male climacteric, to the examination of the male 
or female share in the individual, ete. For me, 
the permanent impression which asserted itself in 
an obvious emphasis of the relation and the recip- 
rocal relation of the antithesis male-female, was 
the important factor. 

In recent years since I have hit upon these 
fundamental phenomena of the neurosis, I have 
often asked myself if I, too, in the course of my 
development from childhood was not dominated 
by a similar doubt notwithstanding the fact that 
the question of hermaphroditism only attracted 
me at a very late period and from the standpoint 
of a critic, and hence in a secondary manner. 
Also my rejection of the biological hermaphro- 
ditism as a cause of the neurosis (Flies) I would 
use as an argument against such doubts in my 
early youth, if I were not familiar with the fact 
that often the negation is the assertion of an old 
interest which has become unconscious. But my 
view of life shows me that I must have become 
master of old childish contrary tendencies, with- 
out the exaggerated masculine protest having 
been developed. Because I have in life, as well 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 263 


as in science, after a first abstract valuation of 
the masculine principle over the feminine, re- 
jected the flood of arguments to prove the orig- 
inal deficiencies of women, with pertinent calm- 
ness. 

I believe, however, concerning the former 
critics of the “masculine protest,” from the man- 
ner in which they have undertaken the contest, 
and from their stubborn failure to understand it, 
that the exaggerated savageness of their attack 
in a strictly scientific question is referable nearly 
as much as is their fear of the concept “hermaph- 
roditism” to a childhood impression which alarm- 
ingly presented to them an accentuated effem- 
inacy or hermaphroditism, with which, however, 
it is not my intention to deter any one from a 
scientific criticism. 

Besides, there is no better way of judging the 
reaction of the neurotic psyche than from the 
answers to questions showing estimation of the 
opposite sex. It will become apparent that 
every stronger denial of the equality of the sexes, 
every detraction or overvaluation of the opposite 
sex is invariably connected with a neurotic dis- 
position and neurotic traits. They are all de- 
pendent on the neurotic tendency to obtain se- 
curity, and all manifest distinct traces of the 
masculine protest and are evidence of the essen- 
tial, more abstract adherence to a guiding fiction. 


264 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


They are one and all, expedients of human 
thought to enhance the feeling of personal worth. 

It follows from the exposition of my psychol- 
ogy of the neuroses that children with male as 
well as those with female tendencies, look for- 
ward with fear to the lot of a woman, to be sub- 
ject to a man, to be deprived of virginity, in- 
jured, to be obliged to bear children, to play a 
subordinate role in life, to obey, to be backward 
in knowledge, in skill, in strength, wisdom, to be 
weak, to have periods, to become a sacrifice to 
husband and children, to become at last an old 
and neglected woman. How this fear of the 
future gives rise to egoistic traits of character has 
been described above. I have described a typical 
case of a little girl in the “Disposition zur Neu- 
rose” (l.c.). 

I am able to show in the case of a patient suf- 
fering from a gastric neurosis a line of conduct 
which is regularly observed in the psychic devel- 
opment of neurotic patients. This is the antici- 
pation in thought and emotion of all disadvan- 
tages which could be expected to occur. This 
tendency is observed in early childhood when, 
where there is organic inferiority and the evils 
arising therefrom, it is of excessive growth. 
Very often this feeling occurs at the time imme- 
diately preceding the falling asleep and it is then 
not remarkable that a dream fiction spurs further 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 265 


this effort of anticipation in a form to cause fear. 
Only the dream, in resemblance to the hallucina- 
tion, brings with it a condition of feeling, of emo- 
tion, which has the significance as anticipation of 
emotion parallel to anticipation in thought in a 
waking condition. The hallucinatory excitabil- 
ity is, as I have already emphasized in the “Studie 
uber Mindwertigkeit von Organ,” an extended 
capacity of the brain which is overstrained in 
compensatory directions, serves the neurotic 
tendency to gain security and owes its repre- 
sentative faculty in consciousness to the memory 
which follows a certain tendency to the neurotic, 
cautious apperception. ‘The childish undevel- 
oped psyche shows at most, traces of tendencies 
toward hallucinatory feelings which are to be un- 
derstood as the fictitious preparations for a goal, 
as anticipation in time of uncertainty. 

Thus laughing in sleep, or pleasant sensations 
in the anticipatory quest of organic satisfaction, 
or of security. The hallucinatory excitement in 
the neuroses and psychoses always, and without 
exception, serves the guiding fiction of the ideal 
of personality. The significance of the halluci- 
nations of pain and anxiety for the fiction of 
nervous diseases should also be taken into ac- 
count. A further examination of the mechanism 
of the hallucination teaches us unequivocally that 
it is composed of tendencies to abstraction and 


266 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


to anticipation, and that it gains significance as 
a strengthened fiction or as a warning souvenir 
because it acts as a spur to the assurance of the 
feeling of personal worth. ‘That they are con- 
nected with traces of memory has no essential sig- 
nificance. The psyche works without exception 
with the content of consciousness and with sen- 
sations that are given by experience and originate 
in the corporal substratum. The significance of 
the psyche, and especially of the neurotic psyche, 
lies in the special choice of these memory traces 
and in their connection with the neurotic apper- 
ception which gives them their trend. There- 
fore the nervously exalted tendency to gain 
security makes use of a specially developed func- 
tion of prevision, of hallucination, in which ab- 
stractly and imaginatively a scene unrolls, an 
anticipated dénouement, a foreseen finale, with 
eagerness so that the hallucinated individual 
builds the bridges to it, or they have an admoni- 
tory quality warning them to choose another 
way. Hallucinations as well as dreams are, like 
other tentatives of the psyche, fitted for finding 
the way which leads to the maximation or preser- 
vation of the ego-consciousness. In it are re- 
flected the faiths, the hopes or the fears of the 
patient. 

The above patient was on the eve of marriage 
when her gastric neurosis began. She suffered 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 267 


from pains in the region of the stomach, belching, 
vomiting, loss of appetite and obstipation. One 
evening, shortly before going to sleep she heard 
the word “Eskadambra” distinctly. The forma- 
tion of apparently meaningless words are often 
among the performances of neurotics. Usually 
they prove to be put together according to a plan, 
just as children invent languages by means of 
which they attain a feeling of superiority. Pfis- 
ter was able to make interpretations of the word 
pictures which originated from fascination in the 
cases of those having the “gift of tongues.” 

In a previous chapter I have given a solution 
of an hallucinatory “sawing” in the ears, in two 
other cases I found the roaring serving as an ad- 
monitory memory on the roaring of the sea and 
its dangers as a sense-picture of life, just as 
Homer compares the @yopa to the roaring sea.” 

In paranoia and dementia preecox the emotions 
leading to the masculine protest disguise them- 
selves in the form of hallucinations and assure 
the psychotic scheme through their acoustic or 
visual complement. Likewise concerning the 
above mentioned rounding off of a psychic move 
into a hallucination of hearing, we may assume 


5On another occasion I found roaring in the ears to be a re- 
minder of the tones of telegraph wires. These tones reminded 
him of his isolation in childhood where alone he often embraced 
the world as does the telegraph, with his hopes for the future. 


268 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


that a strong inner necessity has led to a greater 
tension of the tendency to gain security, for 
which the word “eskadambra” though without 
value or significance for the patient, can repre- 
sent a signal or sign.® One is justified in think- 
ing, however, that a thorough understanding of 
this word would show a meaning which would re- 
veal to us the mental condition of this girl. As 
a rule it is easy to obtain an understanding of 
hallucinations of this sort, at least not more diffi- 
cult than for short fragments of dreams. Asked 
concerning the impression of the new-word for- 
mation, the patient answered, she recalled al 
hambra” by this word. For this she had evi- 
dently always had a great interest; once it stood 
proudly, but it was now fallen into decay, a ruin. 
The beginning of the word “Esk” was to be 
found in the word “Eskimo,” in “E (tru)skan” 
too, these letters are found. The race of 
“Baskes’” occurred also to her; in this word the 
greater part of “Esk” appears. The patient 
thus indicates the way she has followed in the 
construction of the new word, she has joined a 
fragment of the names of ancient tribes and the 
name of a ruined city. Finally the word “al- 
hambra” had for her also only the significance 

6 As one has to assume also concerning the dream which repre- 


sents the image of a psychic movement in the state of conscious- 
ness. 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 269 


of a fragment, and hence we are Justified in as- 
suming the thought of being broken, made small, 
made short, would emerge in the interpretation 
of the hallucination. The letters “skad” belong, 
as the patient easily discovered, to the word “kas- 
kade.” She said she was certain of this because 
she had used the expression “ganze kaskaden” in 
connection with the period, the menstrual period 
Just passed. 

When it is taken into consideration that this 
patient was about to be married the connection 
of this construction of new words with the psychic 
condition can be understood without anything 
further. ‘That she is disinclined to marry one 
can see from her neurosis, which formed a ready 
obstacle.’ In the hallucination there is a discon- 
nected sketch of the following train of thought: 
the glory of my virginity will be destroyed—I 
shall bear a new race—I will be forced to sacri- 
fice whole cascades of blood. When I had 
brought the interpretation up to this point, the 
patient helped me further by relating that when 
she was eight years old she had heard that a 
woman of her acquaintance had died from loss 
of blood at the birth of a child. Since then she 

7 As has already been mentioned, the anticipation of marriage 
furnishes one of the most potent moments for the accentuation of 
a neurosis or for the development of a psychosis. The contrary 


expressions of these patients, such, for instance, as “I would very 
much like to be married,” always prove themselves to be platonic. 


270 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


had always been afraid of childbirth. What 
now is the meaning of this hallucination? Can it 
be defined, even remotely, by the word “wish-ful- 
fillment”? The meaning of this new formation 
of words is the anticipatory interpretation in the 
direction of a danger to be feared, of being hu- 
miliated, or the fear of becoming a ruin, as she 
had often called her mother, of dying like the 
woman she remembered in her childhood. This 
feeling against female functions (and the pa- 
tient indeed strove also consciously against mar- 
riage) is of older date, originated in early child- 
hood, and was at that time embodied in the wish 
to be ahead, healthy, strong like her father. It 
became then a fictitious guiding line and was 
filled with a logical content, which was grouped 
about a masculine ideal of personality, and was 
filled also with a fear in the same direction 
against a feminine role. Now I was able also to 
make clear to the patient the meaning of her 
stomach neurosis. It was a hallucinatory excite- 
ment which reflected the hardships of pregnancy, 
warning the patient to avoid the same. In the 
_ waking condition, in the dream and in halluci- 
nations and in the neurosis there was a harmony 
of the tendency towards security—do not be a 
woman, do not submit, be a man! 

This girl manifested in her demeanor rough, 
resolute traits, and could get along with no one. 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 271 


Her ambition flamed blazingly and made her in- 
tolerant. She required unconditional submis- 
sion from her fianc& whom she treated very badly 
and with whom she often dissolved all relations. 
Once, however, when he turned his attention to 
another girl, she offered everything in order to 
hold him. One of the day dreams of her child- 
hood consisted in the phantasy that the whole 
human race was going to destruction and that 
she alone would remain, an analogy with the 
myth of the flood in which the ego-centric, inimi- 
cal nature of the patient is clearly manifested. 
In the cases of many patients who show signs 
of the tendency to “have everything” as in the 
case of the girl just described, traits of character 
of an opposite nature are found. They are often 
of such importunate honorableness, modesty and 
contentedness that the peculiar accentuation of 
these qualities awakens the suspicion of a special 
arrangement. Their conscience always makes 
itself heard and their feeling of being at fault 
is always ready to react on the slightest occasion.® 
The solution of this enigma which has puzzled 
humanity for a long time, is furnished by an un- 
derstanding of the craving for security which 
breaks through the direct aggressive guiding 
line, and which puts an end to greed and immod- 


8 Adler, “Ueber neurotische Disposition,” 1. c, and Fortmül- 
ler, 1. c. 


272 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


eration as soon as the egoistic ideal is threatened 
by them. Conscience then constitutes, ‘so to 
speak, an intermediate guiding fiction, as does 
also its anticipatory exaltation, the abstract self- 
accusation of guilt. These are instances in which 
all actions planned and anticipatory preparations 
are changed around in such a way that they are 
not injurious, that they permit the feeling of per- 
sonal worth to be preserved. We perceive on 
this point the opposition in the original feeling 
of inferiority as a compensation for the feeling of 
uncertainty which has come to moral expression. 
Now the neurotic can exclude a number of pos- 
sibilities which could degrade him. In other re- 
lations, also, the effect of the craving for security 
is recognizable, in morals, in religion, in super- 
stition, In stirrings of conscience and in the feel- 
ing of guilt. They all form themselves into rigid 
formule and principles such as the uncertain 
neurotic loves. And he can prepare himself by 
practice in small things, test his moral strength 
on mere nothings and especially—principiis 
obsta!—secures himself from a moral fall which 
he exaggerates in anticipation by feeling the 
moral defeat beforehand. This last hallucina- 
tory expedient resembles the security through 
neurotic anxiety, and indeed conscientiousness, 
self-accusation, and anxiety often complement 
each other, or alternate with each other, in the 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 273 


neurosis. ‘The knowledge of this fact is of great 
importance to the psycho-therapeutist for the 
understanding of the connection between mastur- 
bation and neurosis and from which may be com- 
prehended the significance as a security of the 
feeling of self-accusation constructed from the 
fact of onanism. If this feeling of guilt is 
brought into junction with the masturbation for 
the purpose of working as a brake against the 
force of sexuality, both constitute, later, a base 
of operation from which the patient augments 
his neurotic disposition in order to guard against 
a reduction of his ego-consciousness. As a rule, 
both—with the assistance of anticipated results, 
as impotence, tabes, paralysis, loss of memory— 
are used as an excuse in order to avoid making 
decisions, and always also for deepening the fear 
of the sexual partner. I have often described 
connections of this sort in this and in previous 
works. In the neurosis, honorableness and con- 
scientiousness border on pedantry, therefore we 
will not be surprised to find how often these quali- 
ties draw their real value from the fact that 
thereby the neurotic is placed in a position to 
humiliate others, to come into conflict with them, 
to raise himself above others and press them into 
his service. It is just the neurotic whose tend- 
ency to dominate contains the scheme “to possess 
everything” and who not rarely preserves mem- 


27% THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ories of sins, who will usually take care not to 
betray a secret which would certainly result in 
his humiliation. He will rather seek to preserve 
the appearance even with great pains and anx- 
iety; will blush anxiously when he lifts his own 
pocketbook from the floor, and will avoid being 
alone in a strange room in order not to fall under 
suspicion of theft, if something should be missed. 
In like manner I found an obstinate wish to pay 
in advance, to owe nothing, in patients to whom 
every expenditure seemed a reduction of their 
ego-consciousness. ‘They preferred undergoing 
an evil and making an end of it to enduring one 
without end, but had at the same time a feeling 
of superiority in doing this, over the one who re- 
ceived the money. 

In the same manner the fanatic adherence to 
truth in many neurotics proves itself to be, as a 
rule, a reaction of the weaker against the supe- 
rior power (in this connection the original pic- 
ture of the same may be called, the “enfant ter- 
rible”). 

I learned from the previous history of a cata- 
tonic that he was oppressed and humiliated by 
his wife. One night he broke out in sobs and 
told her that he had deceived her by an affair 
with a servant girl. His masculine protest made 
use of this expedient, adultery, in order to con- 
nect with it an open confession. Again, in the 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 275 


form of the neurotic conjunction with which we 
are already acquainted, it became apparent that 
the wife not only had the stronger will, but had, 
also, the command of the pocket-book. The pa- 
tient, himself a weak man, was obliged to live 
from her revenues, something that the wife and 
her family made the source of much unpleasant- 
ness, though they knew all about it beforehand. 
In order to protect himself from the superiority 
of his wife and not to submit entirely to her in- 
fluence, he, already engaged in conflict over the 
male domination, arrived at an arrangement of 
a psychic impotence. The wife, on the other 
hand, overcame this impotence and humiliated 
the husband openly. His flirtation with the 
nurse girl was the beginning of his revenge. 
This could only be effective in a way to elevate 
him if he confessed his adultery in a manly way; 
therefore he had recourse to the love of truth, 
which had already served him as a vehicle for all 
sorts of rascality. ‘The fact that he confessed his 
fault with tears was in keeping with his cowardice 
before a decision, but on the other hand, made it 
easier for him to communicate the painful intelli- 
gence to his wife. The further course turned out 
against the masculine triumph of the psychic 
hermaphrodite; the wife went further in her ag- 
gression and complained to her relatives who in 
turn reproached him in the most severe manner. 


276 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Now he fell into an apathy with an augmented 
craving for security, wished to undo his trans- 
gression as it had not assisted him to the mascu- 
line triumph and found the solution in a fiction 
of a purifying miracle which God had wrought 
in him. He was again on the heights, his pre- 
destination phantasy broke out, he stood in com- 
munication with God, received orders and com- 
mands from Him, and built up a psychotic sys- 
tem in which he wandered on the earth as a 
prophet. ‘The masturbation, too, which he prac- 
ticed openly, he designated as a miracle, in order 
thus to escape the feeling of humiliation. Stere- 
otypies were manifested, among other ways, by 
an occasional upright position of the body and 
by holding the head high, a motion which I was 
able to interpret as symbolic, as a phantasy of 
the erection of the male organ. 

“To tell some one a bitter truth—” This ex- 
pression contains the kernel for the comprehen- 
sion of the case just described. The neurotic 
often makes use of the truth in order to cause 
pain to others. One never hears agreeable truths 
from neurotic patients without a reaction imme- 
diately becoming visible, usually in the form of 
an aggravation of the suffering. To every emo- 
tion of love, which is regarded as feminine, as a 
submission, there follows an emotion of hate, as 
masculine protest, the latter in the garments of 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 277 


truth—honor bright! Also in this case of de- 
mentia pr&cox we find a stage where the doubt 
of the neurotic concerning his own masculinity 
is bridged over by means of expedients and by a 
tightening of the guiding fiction where the com- 
pensatory craving for security gives the impulse 
to take a guiding symbol verbally and to con- 
struct the fiction (as if the neurotic were a 
teacher, the Emperor, Savior). Other traits, 
such as moodiness and unsociability, are likewise 
to be recognized as neurotic anticipatory prepa- 
rations, as always fitted to annihilate the supe- 
riority of others and to prevent them from carry- 
ing out their will. 

The neurotic individual is the typical kill-joy 
and peace destroyer. He is misled by his meg- 
alomaniac ideal in conditions of greatest uncer- 
tainty and is always busy trying to hypostasize 
and deify his own guiding line, and to cross those 
of others. These traits are also capable of a 
more extended application. The neurotic re- 
gards his inability to get along with others, his 
disturbing attacks, as proofs that others wish to 
injure him, and erects, as a protection, the wall 
of his principles within which his spirit of mas- 
tery is able to develop. Here emerge tendencies 
such as the desire to be alone, sometimes the de- 
sire to be buried; or pictures, such as being buried 
alive or concealed in the mother’s body (Gruner). 


278 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


At times I have discovered as a fulfillment of this 
wish to dominate in solitude, the habit of remain- 
ing a long time on the stool. Wholly in the 
same direction, i.e., of gaining the upper hand, 
the neurotic carries out his exaggerated yielding 
and adaptability, but'the patient is in this always 
on the watch, although he tries, too, in this way 
to captivate those who are stronger, to deviate 
toward the more manly line and to enjoy his open 
triumph. 

The inclination to daintiness furnishes the neu- 
rotic with the same readiness for conflict. By 
this means he can decry everything, secure him- 
self against decisions and lay claim to his pre- 
rogative. He will be finicky in such instances as 
harmonize best with his tendencies and where he 
can gain the most advantages. In eating, in the 
choice of friends, in amorous relations, he secures 
to himself thereby a troublesome superiority. 
Every one is obliged to make allowances for him 
because he is sick, nervous. This trait of char- 
acter rises to great performances as soon as the 
fear of the sexual partner, of marriage, makes 
use of it. No girl, no man, then amounts to any- 
thing, and a twisted ideal furnishes the neurotic 
with a point of support for the disparagement 
of every one. At other times and in other rela- 
tions, this trait manifests itself as an arrange- 
ment, as the foresight of an individual who has 


NEUROTIC PRINCIPLES 279 


not as yet conquered the weak point of his feel- 
ing of inferiority. He can also be moderate 
“when the wind blows from the northwest,” when 
his will to power requires it. One of the univer- 
sal methods of quieting children when they show 
discontent is by comforting them with a prospect 
of the future, when they will be big, grown up. 
One often hears children themselves say, “When 
I am grown up, I will...” The problem of 
growth engages the attention of children to an 
extraordinary extent and in the course of their 
development they are constantly reminded of it. 
It is thus in regard to the size of his body, the 
growth of his hair, of the teeth, and as soon as he 
comes to speculations concerning the sexual or- 
gans by the growth of the pubes and the genital 
organs. The entrance of the child upon his mas- 
culine röle, of which we have often spoken, re- 
quires a distinct largeness of the person of the 
individual and of the parts of his body. Where 
this is denied him—and here we encounter again 
the basis of somatic inferiority, especially the 
causal rickets (thymus anomalies?), anomalies 
of the thyroid, of the sperm glands, hypophysis, 
ete.—the child has recourse on account of its de- 
sire for masculine value to the positing of the 
masculine protest. ‘Then it acquires the height- 
ened impulse to covetousness, envy, bragging, 
greed, activity, together with the acute feeling of 


280 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


contrast and begins to measure himself con- 
stantly with others, especially with the persons of 
importance in his environment, and finally with 
the heroes from tales and stories. Thus the in- 
dividual comes to a wishful contemplation of the 
future and the phantasy incited by the craving 
for security fills all wishes. 


CHAPTER IV 


THE DEROGATORY TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTH- 
ERS; OBSTINACY AND WILDNESS; THE SEXUAL 
RELATIONS OF NEUROTICS AS A MEANS OF 
COMPARISON 5 SYMBOLIC EMASCULATION 5 
FEELING OF BEING BELITTLED; EQUALITY TO 
MAN AS A LIFE-PLAN 5; SIMULATION AND NEU- 
ROSIS; SUBSTITUTE FOR MASCULINITY; IMPA- 
TIENCE; DISCONTENT; INACCESSIBILITY 


THE compulsive craving of the neurotic to fill 
his egoistic ideal with the overvalued masculine 
traits impels him, especially because of the ob- 
stacles of reality, to a change in the formula of 
his guiding line, so that he attempts to attain the 
goal which he values as equal to the masculine 
goal by means of circuitous paths. What drives 
him to a psychosis is his longing to realize an 
unattainable ideal. Should he suffer a defeat 
in the main line of his masculine protest, or 
should he even anticipate such a defeat, he seeks 
a substitute which he temporarily considers as of 
equal value through an arrangement of intensi- 
fied reassuring expedients. At this point there 


begins as a rule that process of psychic transfor- 
281 


282 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


mation which we designate as neurosis, in so far 
as the guiding fiction does not lead to a violation 
of reality, the patient only feeling it as a disturb- 
ing element, as is the case in neurasthenia, hypo- 
chondriasis, anxiety and compulsion neuroses and 
in hysteria. In the psychosis the guiding mascu- 
line fiction appears disguised in pictures and 
symbols of infantile origin. The patient then 
conducts himself no longer as if he wished to be 
masculine, above, and as if he sought to attain 
this end by every possible means, but through the 
medium of anticipation as though he already had 
attained all these ends and only indicates at first, 
incidentally and in the manner of a foundation 
(depression, persecutory and self-accusatory 
ideas, ideas of poverty), that he is underneath, 
unmanly, feminine. 

For the sake of clarity, I will now proceed to 
the description of some neurotic character traits 
which tend in a direct line to the masculine ego- 
tistic ideal, or are so closely connected therewith 
that they force themselves upon the understand- 
ing as only slight deviations of the masculine pro- 
test. ‘They have been generally regarded as ac- 
tive, masculine traits and the neurotic can thus 
appeal to this general opinion in which there is 
agreement. But we have already endeavored to 
show in previous chapters that in the construction 
of masculine traits the choice of the fictitious goal 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 283 


is dependent upon and guided only within cir- 
cumscribed limits by the conscious understanding 
of the neurotic or even of the critical observer. 
He also makes use of such guiding lines which to 
general logic do not always seem masculine, or at 
least only in part so, such for example as co- 
quetry, deception, etc. As the direct traits of 
character in line with the masculine protest may 
be emphasized, the frequently displayed tendency 
to be a man through and through, courageous, 
ready for attack, open, hard-hearted, cruel, to ex- 
cel every one in strength, influence, power, wis- 
dom, etc. When the fundamental feeling of in- 
feriority demands stronger reassuring compensa- 
tions—because of an expected defeat or the sus- 
picion of one, this compensation ensues by a 
strengthening of the readiness for conflict which 
now strives toward the masculine feeling of su- 
periority, often by circuitous and more abstract 
ways, revealing simultaneous and often contra- 
dictory traits—after the manner of tricks and 
artifices. It is then that the neurotic may mani- 
fest pliancy instead of obstinacy, or side by side 
with it, or as the occasion may require it, traits of 
exorbitant arrogance and modesty, roughness 
and mildness, courage and cowardice, lust for 
power and submissiveness, masculinity and fem- 
ininity, all of which are used to gain security from 
defeat or in order to permit him by circuitous 


284 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ways to enhance his own egoistic ideal or dispar- 
age that of others. That it is possible to con- 
quer by weakness, submissiveness and modesty is 
shown in the example of women and by many ex- 
amples in the history of the world. 

The dominancy of the self-created deities, of 
the guiding fiction is always easily discernible and 
is revealed in the psychosis with unmistakable 
clarity. I will endeavor to show by means of a 
dream of a 22-year-old girl who was suffering 
from enuresis nocturna and in the daytime from 
frequent outbreaks of rage and ill-humor, who 
could get along with no one but me, and who 
often had suicidal ideas, that all of these phe- 
nomena, together with other traits of lust for 
power, of obstinacy or of anxiety were under the 
guidance of the masculine protest, and that this 
protest was dependent in turn upon a constitu- 
tional inferiority of the urinary organ, which in 
combination with ugliness and mental retardation 
gave the impulse to the compensatory exhibition 
of an exaggerated masculine guiding line. In 
order to make the case brief and comprehens- 
ible, I preface the remark that the patient had 
applied the realities of her childhood to a reas- 
suring neurosis, had constructed the enuresis as 
an ever-ready expedient and always had recourse 
to this symptom when her egoistic feeling suf- 
fered a humiliation. In this case, too, there was 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 285 


manifested the colossal power of the tendency to 
disparagement in the arrangement of the seizures 
which drove the mother to a powerless despair, 
while at the same time the patient disparaged her 
mother in the usual form of an allusion by ex- 
cusing herself from all fault and throwing the 
blame on another. The following dream shows 
this in a specially clear manner. 


“My mother showed my friend the dirty cover 
of the bed. We began to quarrel. I say the 
cover is yours and begin to cry bitterly. I awake 
flooded in tears.” 


A short time before she related to me that she 
often awoke weeping from sleep without know- 
ing the cause of her weeping. From the connec- 
tion of the genesis of the disease which was ap- 
parent even at that time the weeping was of sig- 
nificance in relation to the mother, it represented 
one of the most usual childish procedures for 
diminishing the mother’s superiority. After the 
communication of the dream she remarked, “You 
will certainly believe that you are right in your 
opinion concerning my weeping.” One hears 
such remarks during a psychotherapeutic treat- 
ment as a regular thing, and must not overlook 
the concealed criticism therein as a device of the 
tendency to disparage, which is directed against 
everybody. The moderate expression of the 


286 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


same on this occasion led me to suspect that the 
cure of the neurosis was in progress, as the more 
lively reactions were absent. Formerly under 
similar circumstances she would have asserted 
sharply and passionately that I was wrong, or she 
would have omitted to mention or would have for- 
gotten those dreams which confirmed my view. I 
was further confirmed in my assumption by the 
information that the patient after the dream im- 
mediately took off the slightly soiled bed linen and 
washed it in secret which was never the case be- 
fore because the sight of the soiled linen was in- 
tended for her mother. 

For the explanation of the dream she related 
the following. She was firmly convinced that 
her mother told all her acquaintances about her 
enuresis. All her relatives seemed to know of 
her weakness. Once an uncle, obviously in order 
to comfort her, had informed her that both he and 
another brother had for a long time been in the 
habit of wetting the bed. In her dreams she re- 
proached her mother, telling her, “The weakness 
is in your family, you are to blame if I soil the 
bed, the soiled cover is yours.” 

She related further that in changing she often 
took a bed-slip instead of a cover; the one was 
closed, the other open; adding, “And it is easy to 
mistake them in the closet.” 

Behind this thought lies the problem of open 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 287 


and shut which is clearly recognizable as an ex- 
pression for the oppositeness of the sexes. She 
blames her mother for the disease, but at the same 
time casts, so to speak, a furtive glance at its 
source and spring, that is, the femininity for 
which she blames her mother and betrays to us in 
the masculine protest of her dreams how slightly 
she estimates the difference between man and 
woman. Similarly George Sand declared that 
there was only one sex. The quarreling and 
weeping is the most important attitude of her 
aggression against her mother whose superiority 
she tried to destroy in this way as well as by her 
adherence to the enuresis. ‘The fact that at the 
present time she operates against men by her 
enuritic device and thereby avoids marriage and 
“the tyranny of man,” is a natural result to be 
inferred from other perspectives of her neurotic 
psyche. 

An example of the change of formula of the 
guilding masculine fiction which originally was 
“I will be a man,” in the above described stage 
of the treatment was, “I will be superior to my 
mother like a man,” and later on was expressed 
in the words, “I will humiliate my mother by 
feminine means.” In a dream, therefore, in a 
tentative, anticipatory test, this guiding line as we 
have maintained it to be comes to stronger ex- 
pression. ‘The dream is as follows: 


288 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


“T lie in a burning bed. All weep about me. 
I laugh aloud.” 


A discussion of free love had preceded the 
dream. The burning bed, according to the pa- 
tient’s interpretation represented amorous pleas- 
ure. We translate according to our understand- 
ing of the dream.» “How would it be if I should 
embrace free love? Then my mother would be 
humiliated but I would laugh at her, would be 
superior to her.” Attention must also be called 
to the expression “burning,” which arises so fre- 
quently in psychic constructions which spring 
from the urinary functions in antithesis to water 
(enuresis). * 

The laughing in this dream is equivalent to the 
weeping in the first dream. Both show the ag- 
gressive tendency which seeks the mother’s de- 
feat. In this case, too, the untenability of the 
assumption of a splitting of personality is readily 
perceivable. Just as erroneous would be the as- 
sumption of a real sexual wish. This means 
would only serve the purpose of the patient if the 
mother were set back and she could play the part 
of man in regard to her. 

The guiding fiction of the equality to man 
comes to expression In some way or other in all 

1 Adler, “Studie,” 1. c, Addendum. Freud has already touched 


upon the relationship between fire and water in the dream, and the 
allegorical representation based on this. 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 289 


women and girls. As I was able to show in the 
foregoing case, it is the change of formula neces- 
sitated by reality which disguises the masculine 
protest. Hence it is essential in the analysis of 
neurotic female patients to discover at what point 
they protest against their femininity. This 
point can always be found, for the pressure to- 
ward the maximation of the ego-consciousness 
necessitates the construction of a reassuring guid- 
ing line which is erected as an antithesis to the idea 
“feminine.” Cultural or uncultural ideas of 
emancipation, of militancy directed against men 
and their privileges are usually found in normal 
women and girls. They seek to diminish the dis- 
tance as much as possible in dress, attitude, cus- 
toms, laws, views of life. The masculine protest 
of neurotics is exaggerated in all these directions. 
In dress glaring but at the same time mannish 
fashions are affected, as the lengthening of single 
parts of dress and the wearing of strong high 
shoes. Or they avoid all fashions in dress which 
are distinctly feminine. Often there is a lively 
fight against the corset, a fight directed against 
the confinement, but which can also serve other 
purposes and is often brought into play to avoid 
seeing company and is most usually directed 
against the husband. The attitude and habits of 
neurotic women are often so masculine that it is 
noticeable from the first moment. Crossed legs 


290 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


and arms, and at times only indications which 
betray this tendency, as well as the tendency to 
take the left side as a man does or to allow no one 
to stand in front of them, etc., as in the dream. 
In the neurotic’s view of life the usual ideal over- 
estimation of the masculine qualities is compen- 
sated for in a practical manner by the disparage- 
ment of men. In sexual relations anasthesia is 
the rule. Masculine variants, or those which dis- 
parage man are given preference. 

The neurotic psyche of men offers the same 
characteristics. It derives its artifices from an 
imaginary consciousness of femininity in order to 
arrive at a feeling of complete manliness. One 
of my patients who was suffering from asthma 
nervosum presented a very clear example of this 
dynamic. He had been a weak child and had 
suffered from the exudative diathesis, a relation 
to which Striimpell has called attention. His 
early catarrh permitted him already in childhood 
to press his mother into his service. She took him 
to her, cared for him in her bedroom and yielded 
to all his wishes. He was early placed under the 
care of a strict governess of whom he could not 
get the better, notwithstanding his rage and in- 
tractibility. He felt weak before her and thus 
became acquainted with childish deceptions by 
means of which he was able to escape the gover- 
ness, that is, he simulated and exaggerated the 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 291 


catarrhal affection by an arrangement of cough- 
ing and excitation of the bronchial tubes and 
larynx and by asthmatic phenomena which he 
produced after the manner of straining at diffi- 
cult defecation, by tension of the abdomen and 
closing of the anus. He soon learned to know 
that these phenomena gained him a place in his 
mother’s room, and in the course of years pro- 
duced an asthmatic device which he was to set un- 
consciously into activity whenever he felt com- 
pelled on account of his overtense fictitious guid- 
ing goal to rise to the position of the lord of the 
house, and incidentally, of the governess. He 
soon gained the victory so that the governess was 
forbidden to treat him severely or to beat him. 
We see how his egotistic ideal had at its dis- 
posal from now on a neurotic weapon which 
placed him in a position to escape a defeat or to 
prevent the emergence of the feeling of his 
original inferiority in a circuitous way, that is, no 
longer by obstinacy, rage, courage, manliness, but 
that he sought to get ahead by a sort of treachery, 
craft, unmanly conduct, cowardice, a leaning on 
the mother. This subterfuge, hypostasized and 
elaborated to an unconsciously working mechan- 
ism, furnished him the necessary security for his 
whole life. His neurotic symptom which was 
constantly defended and laid claim to by further 
auxiliary lines of his trait of character, 1. e. “to 


292 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


possess everything” by his lust for power, by his 
obstinacy and disputatiousness, and at the same 
time by his cowardice, fear of new undertakings, 
fear of men and women and by the tendency to 
disparagement which always evolves from these 
traits and which played such an important role in 
his aggressive devices furnished him a new organ, 
a means of making himself important in a special 
way, to dominate his world, inasmuch as he could 
always demand the protection of his mother. He 
felt safer with his mother than with his wife, and 
thus he was driven by necessity to fall in love with 
his mother, a love which upon closer analysis 
proved to be a sort of tyranny. Pregnancy 
phantasies reflected for him the feelings of humil- 
iation connected with a feminine role and alter- 
nated with thoughts about castration and with 
phantasies about being a woman. His impulse 
to masturbation revealed the attempt to emanci- 
pate himself victoriously from women, to avoid a 
defeat, to conduct himself in a manly fashion, and 
was continued in similarly directed phantasies of 
greatness, both of which were forms of expression 
of his masculine protest. The imagined small- 
ness of his genital organs, a thought which made 
a marked impression upon him, served him as a 
figure and perceptional form for his inferiority 
and feminine nature. From his childhood he 
sought to attribute all his unsuccessful efforts and 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 293 


defeats to his small penis, apperceived and 
grouped his experiences in this direction and ac- 
cording to related antithetical forms of apper- 
ception of “manly-womanly.” The small penis 
represented to him the figurative marginal con- 
cept between masculinity and femininity and was 
manifestly constructed as was the attitude of the 
patient on the idea of a corporal and psychic her- 
maphroditism and its tragedy. It is no wonder 
that in the psycho-analysis of these cases with the 
male-female manner of apperception which be- 
longs to the foundation of the neurotic psyche, 
one hits only upon sexual relations. They are 
all to be understood as a modus dicendi, as a Jar- 
gon, and figurative modes of expression and are 
to be resolved into forms, whereby strength, vic- 
tory, triumph come to expression in male sexual 
symbols, defeat in female and the neurotic arti- 
fices in both together, usually also in a perverse 
or hermaphroditic symbolism. 

It was easy to detect in our patient that besides 
the sexual mode of expression he had another 
fashion of apperception based upon the antitheti- 
cal formula of inspiration-expiration which had 
been set in operation by the inferiority of his 
respiratory organ inclusive of the nose. Even 
the speech used for our mutual understanding 
likewise made use of such formule and a sigh of 
relief from an oppressed breast could very well 


294 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


be clothed in the figure of “having air again.” 
The patient was also able to represent, in panto- 
mime form, memories of his boyhood race, a wild 
race to get to first place, the desire to be the first 
at the goal by means of breathless efforts. Ina 
dream during the latter part of the treatment he 
made use of his ability to whistle (which is to be 
understood figuratively) in order to accentuate 
his manliness by respiration. ‘The dream was as 
follows: 


“It seemed to me that four people were whist- 
ling. I remark that I can do it just as well as 
they.” 


A.short time before he had begun a relation 
with the governess in the family of his married 
brother and had asked her the question if his 
brother often visited his wife at night. The girl 
answered in the negative. Being able to whistle 
is the ideal of all small boys and some girls make 
efforts to acquire this manly attitude. In his 
dream he made a tentative comparison to see if he 
was the equal of his male relatives and thus ar- 
rived from this line, which originated in his feel- 
ing of effeminacy, to the masculine protest. He 
is the equal of all four. 

In this case too I found my observation con- 
firmed that the neurotic feels his sexual libido, 
and manifests the same only in accordance with 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 295 


the manner and degree that is required by his 
fictive goal, so that every psychological opinion 
which perceives in the libido a constitutionally ac- 
quired factor, in its alterations and fortunes the 
essence of the neurosis, becomes untenable. It is 
especially easy to arrange sexual and excitations 
and they are always in some way subordinated 
to the masculine protest. The identification of 
masculinity with sexuality takes place in the neu- 
rosis by means of abstraction, symbolization and 
a figurative somatic-jargon, and it is this false 
artifice of the neurotic which fills his thought con- 
tent with sexual pictures. 

The contentiousness and hidden querulousness 
which stand in the closest relation to the tendency 
to disparagement present difficult tactical and 
pedagogic problems to the psychotherapeutist. 
They betray in every case the weak point, the 
feeling of inferiority of the patient which drives 
him to compensation. It is easy to uncover this 
neurotic aggressiveness by a very simple mode of 
approach. Let it be imagined that the neurotic 
feels that he has entirely lost his masculinity and 
feels himself humiliated and now let it be noted 
through what artifice he seeks to carry out the 
completion of his character or his overcompensa- 
tion. One will then find a number of prepara- 
tory devices, characteristics, syndromes and sym- 
toms which have for their aim the representation 


296 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


of an ideal organ, but one must however be pre- 
pared to view this as a riddle, which requires so- 
lution. For this “ideal organ,” namely—the 
neurosis or psychosis, is of masculine origin and 
has for its purpose the prevention of a lowering 
of the patient’s ego-consciousness, and to bring 
him closer to his masculine goal. Cruel reality, 
however, impedes the development of this fiction 
to such an extent that the most peculiar circuitous 
ways must be resorted to so that partial and ap- 
parent results are striven after without bringing 
the patient nearer to his goal. Without the help 
of the psychotherapeutist who in rare cases may 
prove to be a substitute for the fortunes of life, 
this “will to seem’? becomes more and more ac- 
centuated in case of failure, and constantly 
strengthens the abstract, main line of the old 
guiding fiction. One of the principal circuitous 
ways along which this ideal organ—i. e. the mas- 
culine protest,—works, is the tendency to dispar- 
agement. That is the reason that it has been 
mentioned so often because it attracts the atten- 
tion of the physician and is an expression of the 
strength of the neurotic impulse. It likewise 
furnishes an ever-present point of contact by 
means of which it may be possible to instil some 
insight into the patient and it is at the bottom of 
those phenomena which Freud has described as 
resistance and has falsely viewed as the result of 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 297 


repressed sexual excitations. With this tendency 
the neurotic comes to the physician and he carries 
it with him, as does also the normal person, when 
he returns home. Only that then his increased 
insight stands as a guard, warning him against 
giving expression to this tendency and thus the 
patient is forced to show his desire to be “‘first” in 
other ways. 

One should never hesitate to guard all expres- 
sions of doubt, of critique, of forgetfulness, of 
tardiness, all demands of the patient, relapses 
after improvements, continued silence, as well as 
adherence to symptoms as effective means of the 
tendency toward disparagement directed against 
the psychotherapeutist. One will rarely err in 
proceeding thus and usually be justified in this 
opinion by the comparison of coincident phe- 
nomena of a similar trend. The expressions of 
these tendencies are often of the most subtile na- 
ture. Shall I add that the most extensive experi- 
ence and knowledge in regard to this “tendency 
to disparage” is barely sufficient to prevent being 
taken by surprise, and that a great deal of tact, 
renouncement of authority, and even friendliness, 
watchful interest and the consciousness of being 
in the presence of a sick person with whom it is 
out of place to engage in strife are indispensable 
to good results? 

I found it necessary once to explain to a stut- 


298 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


tering patient the position of the larynx, by 
means of a drawing. Instead of taking the 
drawing home with him as he had intended in or- 
der to give it further consideration, he left it with 
me on the table. The next day he was a quarter 
of an hour late, first went to the toilet, related 
something of another patient who had complained 
of me, and after some silence related a dream 
which ran as follows: 


“It seemed to me that I had been looking at a 
drawing. A cylinder extended out from a cir- 
cle; it did not run straight but sideways.” 


The interpretation showed that this dream had 
reference to the drawing of the larynx on which 
the larynx was drawn straight downwards. The 
patient argued with me in the dream as though he 
would say “How would it be if my physician were 
wrong?” and thus revealed to me his distrustful 
attitude—the fear of being deceived and at the 
same time the tendency to disparagement directed 
against me, which had been revealed by the sub- 
conscious measures of the forgetfulness, the de- 
lay, the recital of the complaint, the silence, and 
finally by the tentative endeavor in the dream to 
put me in the wrong. One may justly expect 
that the patient applies his stuttering for the same 
purpose against me and will continue thus to use 
it. In spite of many contradictions he forced me 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 299 


into the role of a former teacher whom he often 
corrected, so that he could continue to use against 
me his former artifices.” This was revealed by 
his remarks concerning his dreams and further 
from the fact that his disease was assumed and 
adhered to in order to decry his father and gain 
superiority over him. 

A female patient who was assigned to me for 
treatment because of depression, suicidal ideas, 
weeping fits and “lesbischen Neigungen” was 
sent by me after a brief course of treatment be- 
cause of the suspicion of a genital affection, to a 
gynecologist who removed a large myoma and 
prognosticated a cure of the neurosis from the 
operation. After the operation the patient 
journeyed to her home and from there wrote me 
that the gynecologist was right in his prognosis. 
Of course she added it was to be expected that 
the operation succeeded better in the case of a 
countess upon whom the same surgeon had oper- 
ated, and of whom she had read in the papers, 
than it had in her case. Soon afterward she vis- 
ited me, argued against one of my contributions 
which she had in some way procured, declared her 
extreme interest in my method of treatment, said 
her condition was the same as before the opera- 
tion and vanished. From the portion of her his- 


2 An artifice which had for its purpose a tendencious, deroga- 
tory, affective expression. 


300 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


tory which she communicated to me during the 
treatment it became apparent among other things 
that she lived at swords-points with her whole en- 
vironment, that she dominated her husband en- 
tirely, that she hated the village and played the 
man psychically and sexually to one of her 
friends. Her fear of the blessing of children was 
astounding, sexual relations unbearable because 
her husband seemed too heavy. When the latter 
visited her once during the treatment, she had the 
day before his visit the following dream: 


“Tt seemed to me that the whole room was en- 
veloped by fire.” 


She gave the information spontaneously that 
this was a typical dream, and that it always re- 
turned at the time of her menstrual period. 
This time it occurred a long time before her pe- 
riod. ‘The dream could be easily recognized as 
an attempt to use a feminine situation, menstrua- 
tion, for the purpose of the masculine protest— 
that is to avoid sexual relations. A deeper pene- 
tration into the meaning which would certainly 
have revealed an enuresis in childhood (fire-my- 
oma see “Studie,” Appendix) was prevented by 
the interruption of the treatment. I received an- 
other letter which contained the assurance that 
the patient from now on would try to find peace 
in her environment in my sense of the word. I 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 301 


think that this must have been sfill difficult for 
her. | 

Obstinacy, wildness and unruliness may in the 
same way serve as the proof which female pa- 
tients seek in order to show how little they are 
fitted for the feminine role. ‘These preparations 
begin already in the earliest childhood and lead 
gradually to physical and psychic aptitudes in 
gestures, facial expression, emotional predisposi- 
tions and mimicry, while the character develops 
in the direction of the ideal guiding line and cau- 
tiously introduces the patients’ attitude of life. 
In many cases these characteristics are manifested 
in a direct manner and serve without deviation for 
the expression of the masculine protest. Or 
there takes place a change of formula in the guid- 
ing fiction, either because of the emergence of 
contradictions in the guiding line, in the event of 
a real or threatened defeat, or because of some- 
thing that usually coincides therewith, namely, an 
obstacle of reality which is estimated as unsur- 
mountable. Under the construction of a secur- 
ity-giving anxiety or feeling of guilt, or security- 
giving antithetical traits (dissociation of other 
writers), the deviations in neurotic circuitous 
ways follow. But the preparatory devices per- 
sist. It is only that the neurotic cautiousness in- 
troduces the devia—under these new forms of se- 
curity, anxiety, feeling of guilt, seizures, when 


302 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


the patient would otherwise have had to answer 
with the originally developed emotions such as, 
anger, rage, aggression. Frequently there come 
to light purposefully grouped memory pictures 
of a certain “boundlessness,” thoughts, memories, 
illusions as though one were boundlessly desirous, 
sensuous, demoniac, criminal, are manifested, at 
times obviously arranged oversights and accidents 
which are nothing else than admonitions to be 
cautious. Or the sudden termination of the di- 
rect masculine aggressiveness takes place always 
just before a decision, a peculiarity which char- 
acterizes many neurotic love affairs. The devia- 
tion in such cases from the direct guiding line 
may follow in a perverse manner under the in- 
fluence of the craving for security, or the guiding 
line leads him to seek the protection of the father, 
mother, God, alcoholism or an idea. Attempts 
to reach the top through feminine means, or to sur- 
pass at least, all women, leads to excessive cleanli- 
ness, to the “cleaning mania,” to a masochistic 
subjection or coquetry, to a desire to please and 
in female patients to a constant fretting. Along 
with this there will always be found character- 
traits and tell-tale traces which betray that the 
masculine fiction is all-powerful and seeks to ar- 
rive at its purpose by these circuitous ways. The 
excessive eroticism in many of these cases is not 
to be understood as real, that is to say, as depend- 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 303 


ing upon a constitutional basis but shows itself to 
be associated with the fiction, and to be due to an 
uninterrupted attentiveness which has taken an 
erotic direction. The same is true of perversions 
and an apparently weakened libido, which are 
constructed from neurotic subterfuges. All sex- 
ual relations in the neurosis are only a simile. 
The fear of the superiority of the male and the 
depreciatory struggle directed against it is often 
clothed, as result of the neurotic antithetical per- 
spective, in phantasies of emasculation which have 
for their object the deprivation of the male of 
worth. In the dreams of these female neurotic 
patients this comes clearly to light and can be 
readily proved by coexistent derogatory tenden- 
cies. One of these dreams is here given. The 
patient came under my care shortly after she had 
undergone an operation for a fistula, because of a 
compulsory thought and excitement. The com- 
pulsory thought ran, “I will never be able to at- 
tain anything.” At our very first meeting she 
expressed the thought whether I would be able to 
attain anything. The same line of disparage- 
ment illuminated her dream. She dreamed, “I 
cried out in my dream, Marie, the fistula is there 
again.” The surgeon had promised her complete 
recovery and kept his word. He is under obli- 
gations to her in many ways and did not wish to 
takeafee. The patient became very excited over 


304 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


this and regarded it as an humiliation. For some 
time after she tortured herself with plans for pay- 
ing the debt. Her servant was called Marie, and 
she had never spoken to her about the operation. 
If there should take place a new breaking out of 
the fistula her first trip would be to the surgeon 
to whom she would express her opinion. Marie, 
a female servant becomes the surgeon. The pa- 
tient imagines the circumstances demanded by her 
masculine egoistic feeling, the surgeon has oper- 
ated poorly, has not kept his promise, is a woman 
and a servant at the same time. This expresses 
the way in which she could attain everything if 
she were only a man. 

When one examines the published analyses of 
no matter what psychological school the mechan- 
ism of the neurotic masculine protest will always 
be found therein. I shall again emphasize this in 
connection with the analysis of a case of migraine. 

The patient related immediately from the rem- 
iniscences of her childhood that she had constantly 
lived in conflict with her elder brothers because 
they wished to dominate her. This sort of rem- 
iniscences led, as soon as they were voluntarily re- 
Jated, to a hidden contest against male domina- 
tion, and one will never be deceived in the as- 
sumption that other character-traits also point to 
this strife to become equal to the male. Unin- 
fluenced, our patient continued to relate that she 





Pt ee an 9 ee en Zn ee 





TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 305 


played almost exclusively with boys and was 
treated by them as one of their kind. This 
method of expression betrayed very clearly the 
high estimation in which the male sex was held, 
which brought this girl nearer to her father— 
something which may easily be interpreted as 
sexual love for the father and as the “incest com- 
plex.” 

The development of our patient took the same 
course. She took her father wholly as her ideal; 
especially as she once caught her mother m a lie 
she was anxious to imitate her father’s example of 
truthfulness and punctuality.” She remembered 
also that her father had often regretted that she 
was not a boy, and that it was his wish that she 
should study. In this situation an egoistic feel- 
ing was naturally developed in which ambitious 
efforts could not be absent. On the other hand 
her bashfulness which wrecked many of her prin- 
ciples was very noticeable to herself and others. 
This bashfulness is found with extraordinary fre- 
quency in the histories of neurotics. It is identi- 
cal with the feeling of uncertainty, as soon as this 
is manifested in relations with others. Blushing, 
stuttering, downcast looks, avoidance of the so- 
ciety of adults, excitement before examinations 

3 What other authors term imitativeness, identification, is always 


to be looked upon as the assumption of a model for the purpose of 
a heightening of the ego-consciousness. 


306 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


and stage fright often accompany the attempts at 
approaches to other people or at the establishment 
of relations with them. Analysis shows that the 
feeling of inferiority is the source of this sort of 
uncertainty, usually accompanied by a strong 
feeling of shame. The feeling of inferiority is 
conditioned by somatic inferiority which makes it- 
self felt psychically, by faults of childhood and 
strong psychic pressure on the part of parents 
and relatives, and finally by real or imagined 
femininity which develops early in strong con- 
trast to a male member of the family (father or 
brother). The analogy according to which the 
most diverse emotions of being belittled, of humil- 
iation, of inferiority are apperceived by the child 
is then usually the analogy of “the smallness of 
the penis,” which is to be understood symbolically, 
and thoughts of castration develop, of a feminine 
role in sexual relations, of conception and preg- 
nancy or of persecution, of being stabbed or 
wounded, of falling and being “beneath.” All 
these fictions are revealed in day-dreams, halluci- 
nations, dreams, in so far as they are not wholly 
supplanted by the fiction of the masculine pro- 
test and express a feeling of being belittled, which 
breaks forth in the thought, “I am a woman,” 
against which the egoistic feeling presses forward 
and the masculine protest struggles. 

Of our patient we hear that she had some 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 307 


knowledge of sexual relations at a time when 
from lack of experience she was unable to take 
into account its results and purposes. In such 
cases we may always expect to find bashfulness, 
shame and doubt, and in later years fear of tests 
and decisions in every form, traits of character 
which resolve themselves analytically into the idea 
that others might be able to discover on the per- 
son of the patient genital defects or omissions. 
The characteristics which display an effort to at- 
tain equality with the male sex are usually mani- 
fested at an early age, and this effort occupies the 
foreground, while in many cases because of a 
tinge of hopelessness “the innate coloring of the 
decision” is affected. Because the direct route to 
masculinity is closed or seems to be so, circuitous 
and deviating ways are sought out. On one of 
these circuitous ways lies the socially valuable ef- 
fort of woman toward emancipation, on another, 
the private expression of the masculine protest, 
the neurosis of woman, the construction of the 
ideal male organ. 

It was easy to see in the case of this patient 
that in her childhood she had sought to attain the 
domination of man, of her brothers and her 
father, as she apparently had made very short 
work of her mother. Her father fell entirely 
under her authority. After a little experience 
the conclusion is easily arrived at concerning the 


308 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


direction of her neurotic symptoms, that her 
headache and migraine represent since her mar- 
riage a means for gaining the mastery over her 
husband. And in this mastery she sought a sub- 
stitute for her masculine power which she be- 
lieved to have lost. 

I know the objection which might be raised at 
this point. How shall the severe suffering of a 
neurosis, the terrible pain of trigeminal neural- 
gia, insomnia, unconsciousness, paralysis, mi- 
graine all be thrown into the bargain merely as a 
means to an end, because of the failure to attain 
equality with man? I have myself struggled 
against this conviction which thrust itself upon 
me. Is the case very much different when human 
beings endure all sorts of hardships for a whole 
life time in order to attain some other worthless 
bubble? Furthermore, as I have already shown, 
on these neurotic circuitous paths to masculinity 
are found also crime, prostitution, the psychosis, 
suicide. This in addition to the mystery which 
shrouds human psychic mechanisms may be cited 
in support of my understanding of the matter. 
The psychic therapy of the neuroses is certainly 
based upon an understanding of the exaggerated 
valuation of the male destiny. And I draw from 
this objection the advantage in regard to my pa- 
tients inasmuch as I endeavor to show them how 
they, placed before a choice between a natural 





TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 309 


role and the neurotic masculine goal, choose the 
greater of the two evils. 

From the previous history of our patient the 
further facts may be emphasized that she always 
had a disinclination to play with dolls, further- 
more that until her marriage she took the great- 
est pleasure in gymnastics and sports. That 
these efforts too, served as a substitute for mas- 
culinity is manifested more from their connection 
with other masculine traits than from their own 
nature, more especially from a sort of importun- 
ity with which the patient spoke of them. She 
was also passionately fond of extensive touring, 
of which inclination since the birth of her child, 
whom she wished and expected to be male, only 
the desire to make occasional journeys re- 
mained. 

The error must be avoided, however, of assum- 
ing that the traits of character here described and 
emphasized by the patient herself formed isolated 
islands in the extensive soul-life of awoman. On 
the contrary, it must be assumed that these mas- 
culine traits came to expression under the pres- 
sure of a dominating tendency, had their origin in 
a distinct life-plan and became conspicuous phe- 
nomena only because they had the power to do so, 
while all around these phenomena there existed 
an indistinct, only occasionally manifested mascu- 
line craving which was principally occupied with 


310 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


the prevention and transformation of feminine 
emotions until such time as it shall have reached 
an independent existence. In this conflict of 
masculine against feminine emotions the egoistic 
feeling is thrown entirely on the side of masculin- 
ity and makes use even of persistently emerging 
feminine emotions, among others also of the fe- 
male sexual appetite in order to collect them as 
humiliating and dangerous,’ to group them, to ex- 
aggerate, to emphasize them and at the same time 
to surround them with sentinels so that they may 
be robbed of their influence. ‘These sentinels, se- 
curities, usually extend beyond the sphere of fem- 
inine emotions. One always finds that these re- 
assurances and protective devices, among which 
should be placed our symptoms of disease, do not 
stop at the mere fulfillment of their destiny, that 
is, the avoidance of defeat, but that they permeate 
these patients with a sort of cautiousness which 
finally renders them unfit for anything. It is 
only then that the primary insecurity which may 
be likened to a fear of a feminine role is at an end, 
but by this time it has permeated the entire life- 
relation of the individual and forces him outside 
the realm of all social relationship. We find all 
our patients in the midst of this retreat and their 

4This affective accentuation is always derived from a purpose- 


ful device. Feminine röle and abyss, drowning, death, being run 
over, or strangled. 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 311 


symptoms are for them assurances that they will 
not be forced back into the tumult of life. From 
this there develops a neurotic picture which often 
reveals a reversion to simpler, more child-like re- 
lations, either because these are developed after 
maturity, or for the reason that maturity was 
generally impeded. ‘Thus many act as though 
they were in the nursery. Family relations be- 
come accentuated to an extraordinary degree, or 
instead of childish love for the parents the old 
childish obstinacy develops and both factors are 
used as guiding symbols, as though the patient 
sought to discover in all persons the father or 
mother. Notwithstanding the fact that he comes 
in conflict with reality on account of this fiction, 
the patient holds fast to it because he found se- 
curity in the relations existing in the nursery. 
Kipling relates of a person lying in the death 
struggle, whom he observed until the expected 
cry for the mother came from his lips. One has 
only to listen to the street-Arabs, who, when hard 
pressed, immediately cry out for their mother, in 
order to comprehend this longing for security. 
The same longing for security has crept into the 
worshipping of the Mother of God. In girls, the 
longing for security is as a rule in more pro- 
nounced analogy to the relation to the father. 
The “uterine phantasy” which is placed in the 
foreground by G. Griiner I have also found em- 


312 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ployed by neurotics only when they wish to ex- 
press that peace can be found only with the 
mother, or when they have thoughts of suicide, 
that is, the wish to return to the same state in 
which they were before birth. (The hermaphro- 
ditic progression backward.) 

Our patient, too, as child and girl sought this 
leaning on her father who spoiled her not a little. 
The mother, as is often the case, was more at- 
tracted to her brothers. This trait also shows it- 
self to be conditioned by the exaggerated estima- 
tion of the masculine principle, which the father, 
being a man, would more readily renounce in her 
favor. Our patient soon noticed that her father’s 
care for her increased whenever she was ill. 
Thus she came to have a special preference for 
being sick, which procured for her further pet- 
ting, love, and sweetmeats. She must have re- 
garded as the most appropriate substitute for 
that manliness which she believed to be lost to her, 
that condition of sickness which gained for her the 
command of the whole house, the gratification of 
all her wishes and permitted her to escape all un- 
pleasant encounters in school and society. Yes, 
it meant for her the highest attainable potency, 
her feeling of security, as soon as her father be- 
lieved that she was ill. And she sometimes pre- 
tended to be ill, that is, she simulated or exag- 
gerated. 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 313 


This fact‘ of simulation in childhood is often 
found in the anamneses of neurotics. I have 
called attention to this phenomenon in the “Psy- 
chischen Behandlung der Trigeminus Neural- 
gie,” and have mentioned that children often pre- 
tend to be deaf, blind, dumb, ete. E. Jones men- 
tions this fact in his “Hamletstudie,” and calls at- 
tention to the resemblance of Hamlet’s pretense 
to that of children. 'There are many historical 
examples such as Saul, Claudius and others, and 
they show us the problem in its pure culture. 
The accompanying thought is always how can I 
secure myself from a danger, how can I avoid a 
defeat? It is clear that the neurotic who apper- 
ceives according to the analogy man-woman per- 
ceives in the domination of a position a masculine 
equivalent, a substitute and protection for the 
threatened loss of manliness. And the technique 
of simulation consists in the fact that the individ- 
ual sets forth a fiction and acts in accordance 
therewith as though he had the defect which 
would require such action, while he knows and 
maintains that he has no such defect. We main- 
tain that the psychically conditioned neurotic 
symptom arises in the same way only with this 
difference that the fiction is not recognized as a 
fiction, but is held as true.? 

As is frequently the case, we can obtain the 

5 See theoretical part, Chapter III, “The accentuated fiction.” 


314 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


best insight into this condition not from a neurotic 
symptom, but from a borderline case. We mean 
the psychology of sympathy. We are in a posi- 
tion to feel the suffering of another person as if it 
affected our own corporal sphere. Yes, we can 
even feel the suffering of another in anticipation 
before its occurrence. Well known examples of 
this are the anxious feelings which many persons 
experience when they see others, servant girls, 
roof workers or circus actors in dangerous situa- 
tions, or even when they only think of such situa- 
tions. These symptoms are usually felt by those 
who suffer from dizziness when in high places and 
they act when others are in danger exactly as 
though they themselves stood at a window or on 
a rock. They withdraw under the feeling of 
anxiety, placing a safe distance between them- 
selves and the usually not dangerous position, in 
short, they have a feeling akin to that which they 
would have were they themselves in a dangerous 
position. Here the exaggerated cautiousness be- 
comes apparent which in neurotics is so strong 
that they will not cross a bridge for fear that they 
might fall into the water or throw themselves into 
it. I have found similar mechanisms of cautious- 
ness in all cases of fear of places and they reveal 
to us that we have a patient who wishes to avoid 
decisions, who fears whether he is equal to a cer- 
tain situation, usually the sexual partner. In all 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 315 


other phobias, too, as I have shown in my descrip- 
tion of syphilidophobia, (Zeitschr. f. Psych., Bd. 
I, Heft 9, 1911), this “sympathy” in a situation 
which has not as yet been realized, but which may 
be expected with probability constitutes the char- 
acteristic symptom (Lipps). It reveals itself as 
a very efficient tool of the craving for security, 
takes the place in many cases of a morality which 
is not invincible in character. Careful examina- 
tion of this character-trait reveals that it has its 
foundation in that sort of feeling-participation 
for purposes of security, which is clearly set forth 
in Kant’s categorical imperatives for the expres- 
sion of the whole character, when this philosopher 
wishes each single individual to be influenced in 
his action by a point of view which permits of be- 
ing regarded as if it were elevated to a universal 
maxim.° 

Fictions, maxims, guiding principles then simi- 
lar to the reassuring fictions of the simulator form 
part of the mental character of all persons, espe- 
cially of neurotically inclined children. And re- 
duced to their nucleus all of these formule are as 
follows: Act as though you were a complete 
man, or wished to be one. ‘The content of this 
procedure which usually turns out to be in the 
nature of a substitute is determined beforehand 
by the experience of the child and by the special 

6 Vaihinger, “The Philosophy of As If.” 


316 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


type of somatic inferiority from which he suffers, 
but is subject to special alterations which must be 
regarded as formal changes arising from special 
circumstances connected with experiences to 
which he gives neurotic valuations. 

Somatic inferiority determines through the ac- 
companying psychic phenomena of repugnance 
the direction of the ideas of pleasure and thus 
conducts the compensatory processes into the 
psychic regions. Here, too, we behold the crav- 
ing for security at work and usually in such a 
purposeful manner that it works coefficients 
which offer security and thus gives rise to an over- 
compensation.’ In the development, for in- 
stance of the stuttering Demosthenes to the great- 
est orator of Greece, of Clara Schumann, who 
was deaf to an accomplished musician, of the 
near-sighted G. Freitag, of many poets and 
painters with anomalies of the eye to visually 
talented persons and of the numerous physicians 
with anomalies of hearing, we perceive the result 
of the craving for security. We likewise see the 
result in every weak child who wishes to be a 
hero, in the clumsy child with thyroid affection 
who wishes to be an athletic racer and later in 
life always tries to be the first. 

But the direction of the craving for security in 
order to have its objective point must depend 

7J. Reich, “Art and the Eye,” Ost, Rundschau, 1909. 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 317 


upon anexample. And here the man offers more 
attraction to the egoistic feeling of childhood than 
does the woman. Indeed it seems that a female 
example can only be imitated after an initiatory 
conflict and only when this feminine example per- 
mits the attainment of mastery along the lines of 
least resistance. 

This was the case with our patient as it often 
is with cases of migraine. Numerous writers 
have emphasized the circumstance that it is so 
often possible to trace the inheritance of migraine 
from the mother. We must give up the idea of 
the inheritance of migraine in the same manner 
as we were obliged to abandon the view of its or- 
ganic etiology. I have already explained the na- 
ture of this question,® in the case of a seven-year- 
old girl and had before that been convinced that 
a feeling of uncertainty and humiliation precedes 
the attack of migraine, and that the attacks serve 
to place the whole household at the service of the 
sufferer, for which reason the example of the 
mother is imitated. The husband, the father, 
other relatives suffer no less from the attack than 
does the patient. ‘Thus migraine is to be placed 
in the series of neurotic affections which serve to 
secure the mastery in the household and in the 
family. ‘That this tyranny has a masculine sig- 
nificance and can be reduced to the wish to be a 

8“Neurotische Disposition,” Jahrbuch Bleuler-Freud, 1908. 


318 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


man becomes obvious from further analysis. 
But a brief consideration of the migraine which 
occurs at the time of menstruation teaches us to 
understand in this case also the dissatisfaction 
with the feminine role. I have in various in- 
stances learned to recognize this connection with 
epilepsy, sciatica, trigeminal neuralgia. I have 
proved that these latter conditions in the cases 
mentioned by me were psychogenic in nature and 
originated whenever stronger securities were de- 
manded. 

The only sphere of influence which remained 
for our patient was her tyranny over her father, 
over whom she had complete power and this did 
not entirely satisfy her lust for power. Hence a 
“still, still more” declared itself as is often the 
case in neurotic affections and she sought a more 
obvious grasp of the subjugation of the father. 
Her mother suffered from migraine and the time 
of her attacks was, as is usual with patients suf- 
fering from migraine, a time of absolute power. 
Therefore our patient also who comprehended the 
value of the disease pretended to be suffering 
from it” And our patient succeeded in doing 
what aboriginal man succeeded in doing when 


9In my work on “The Neurotic Disposition,” I have already 
emphasized what must likewise be mentioned here, that an original 
somatic inferiority determines the choice of a symptom. In the 
neurosis the mechanism becomes the property of the psyche in the 
form of a disease-preparedness. 





TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 319 


he made himself gods who filled him with terror, 
in creating for herself the migraine. This “as if” 
creation, this fiction became substantially inde- 
pendent, so that the pain and suffering could 
awaken whenever the patient needed them. ‘The 
dramatic performance became so successful that 
the patient, because of its value in the direction of 
her tendencies, no longer saw through the fiction. ' 
Indeed she won by means of the same a superior- 
ity over and security against the husband just as 
she had previously done in regard to her father 
when she made use of this weapon to attain se- 
curity. She strove to attain a masculine part in 
the marriage relation, directing all her activities 
towards gaining the mastery over her husband, 
but as there always remained an “and yet” it was 
necessary to obtain still further substitutes as evi- 
dences of power. And the most important of 
these substitute formations was the resolution 
not to have any more children. It had become a 
general principle in the household of this patient 
as in many others (one of which I described in 
the “Männliche Einstellung Weiblicher Neuroti- 
ker,” Zeitsch., f. Psychoanalyse, Heft 4, 1910) 
that a woman who suffered from such headaches 
should have no more children. Insomnia, impos- 
sibility of going to sleep again after having been 
disturbed, references to the difficulties concern- 
ing the place of residence, various protective ar- 


820 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


rangements and the spoiling of the only child 
completed the security. 

That these phenomena are merely a new view 
of the old wish for masculinity is proved by her 
first dream. 


“I was at the depot with my mother. We 
wished to visit my father who was ill. I was 
afraid of missing the train. Then suddenly the 
father appeared. Then I was at a watch maker's 
and wanted to buy a substitute for the one I had 
lost.” 


She felt superior to her mother who was greatly 
respected by her, and also to her father who hu- 
mored her slightest wish. Sick means weak. 
The father had died a short time previously. 
Shortly after his death she had one of her dread- 
ful attacks of migraine. In the dream he came to 
life again and his person signified for her a 
maximating of her ego-consciousness. She had 
always been impatient, afraid of being late. Her 
brother came before she did and became a man. 
She felt spurred on to hasten (a man does it 
with one bound, a woman with a hundred), in 
order to arrive at the summit of her ego-conscious- 
ness. ‘The day before the dream she was hasten- 
ing to a concert and was held back by her mother. 
Women are often late and she did not wish to fol- 
low their example. 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 321 


Reality reminded her nevertheless that she was 
a woman like her mother. The thought lies in 
the picture of being together with her mother at 
the depot. Her aggressive affect which is identi- 
cal with the masculine protest is directed against 
her husband, against her father. In the further 
analysis of the dream the disparaging thoughts 
come to light, such as that the wife is stronger, 
more vigorous and healthier than theman. Then 
as a further incentive to conflict, the father (the 
man) suddenly emerges. This simile is taken 
from swimming and signifies in the neurotic per- 
spective the “being above” in opposition to being 
“beneath.” While the patient was afraid of 
missing the train, of being left behind in compari- 
son with another, that is to say in comparison with 
the man, which can be supplied from the connec- 
tion—to submit to him, she notices as her ex- 
perience increases that the man is first, is above. 
The application of a picture, of an abstract idea 
in space for the purpose of illustrating the feel- 
ing of being belittled is often found in the neuro- 
sis, (See Syphilidophobia, 1. c.) because it is 
adapted to prepare the disposition to conflict in 
the most extensive manner by means of the ficti- 
tious, abstract antithesis “nothing or all.” Inthe 
same manner the artifice is made use of in paint- 
ing, of representing the power of woman and the 
fear she inspires by giving her a higher position 


322 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


in space. In religious and cosmological phan- 
tasies this representation of superiority is the ele- 
vation of the position assigned. That in her 
dream the patient came through the spatially 
antithetical scheme according to the analogy of 
“man-woman,” is indicated in the position of the 
patient beside her mother, that is, with her 
mother. 

Thus the first dream which the patient had 
during the course of the treatment begins with 
considerations of masculine and feminine roles. 
One should never neglect to take into considera- 
tion unprejudicially the possibility of the contin- 
uation of the dream and to await and compare 
new confirmatory data, even though the psycho- 
therapeutist may have the most firm convictions 
concerning the significance of the problem for the 
neurosis. ‘The further explanation of the patient 
was in regard to a watch chain which had been lost 
through the fault of her husband. She cannot 
remember having lost a watch. Interrogated 
concerning the significance in the dream of the 
watch which was substituted for the chain, the pa- 
tient answered with considerable affect but eva- 
sively, that it was not the loss of the chain but of a 
charm attached to it that disturbed her. In short 
the watch hanging to a lady’s chain is identical 
with the lost watch charm for which the patient 
grieves and for which she seeks a substitute. 


TENDENCY TO DISPARAGE OTHERS, ETC. 323 


The dream began with a symbolic contrast rep- 
resented in space of an inferior femininity with a 
superior masculinity and ends with the logically 
following conclusion of the striving for a substi- 
tute for the lost masculinity. In this fictitious 
guiding line thus constructed the character, the 
_ affect reaction, the predispositions and neurotic 
symptoms must be represented, the correctness of 
which assumption the result of the case substanti- 
ated. ‘The character-traits of impatience, discon- 
tent, obstinacy and reticence proved therefore to 
be, as did all the rest, auxiliary lines which stood 
in a dependent relation to the guiding fiction, that 
of attaining a masculine elevation. 


CHAPTER V 


CRUELTY. CONSCIENCE. PERVERSION AND 
NEUROSIS. 


THE discovery of traits of a cruel nature in the 
very earliest childhood is unusually frequent in 
the course of an analysis of neuroses and psy- 
choses. It would be wrong to apply our moral 
standards to the first two years of life, and to re- 
gard the activities of such children, who in reality 
are still incapable of either good or evil, as sadis- 
tic or brutal as it often happens when parents or 
guardians relate the histories of psychopaths. 
For these manifestations become psychic, or in 
our sense neurotic only when they begin to serve 
a definite end and are constructed as an abstrac- 
tion which has some future tendency in view.* 
The fact that they are always created out of pos- 
sibilities and capabilities of experience does not 
justify the assumption of a constitutional factor. 
As a matter of fact one only finds the character- 
trait of cruelty as a compensatory psychic con- 
struction in those children who, aside from this, 

1See also Wagner v. Jaureg. “Ueber krankhafte Triebhand- 


lungen,” Wiener klin. Wochenschrift, 1912. 
324 


CRUELTY, CONSCIENCE, ETC. 825 


are forced by their feeling of inferiority to an 
early and hasty development of their ideal of per- 
sonality. 'The accompanying traits of obstinacy, 
rage, sexual precocity, ambition, envy, greed, 
malice and delight in doing harm as they are reg- 
ularly evoked by the guiding fiction, and which 
the strife and emotional predispositions help to 
form and mobilize, furnish the highly colored 
Kaleidoscopic picture of the refractory child. 
The lust for power of such children is regularly 
manifested in the family life and play, but most 
of all in their bearing, attitude and glance. In 
the play and early thoughts concerning the choice 
of a vocation, the tendency to cruelty is often be- 
trayed in a veiled manner and makes them re- 
gard as ideal types, the hangman, the butcher, the 
policeman, the grave digger, the savage or coach- 
man, “because they can whip the horses,” or the 
teacher, “because they can whip the children,” 
the physician, “because they cut,” or the soldier, 
“because they shoot,” the judge, etc.” The spirit 
of investigation is also often associated with this, 
and the torturing of animals and children, specu- 
lations and phantasies concerning possible misfor- 
tunes, often of those which might befall near rela- 
tives, an interest in funerals and church-yards 
and in horrible sadistic stories, are begun. 

The first purpose of these exaggerated tenden- 


2 Adler, “Aggressionstrieb,” 1. c. 


326 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


cies to cruelty, is to prevent the emergence and 
the becoming effective of the ever present possi- 
bility of weakness and pity, because these stand 
in opposition to the masculine guiding line. The 
general spreading of this craving to be manly 
which is thought to lead to superiority over 
others, is nowhere so clearly shown as in the dis- 
interested pleasure in injuries. In neurotics this 
may be especially strongly emphasized and may 
be utilized in the most unreasonable manner for 
the purpose of exalting the ego-consciousness. 
La Rochefoucauld expresses this in his quaint 
manner as follows, “There is something in the 
misfortunes of our friends which is not quite dis- 
pleasing.” 

I heard a patient laugh aloud when told of the 
Messina earthquake. He suffered from severe 
masochistic attacks. Compulsory laughter often 
possessed this patient when he was in the presence 
of a superior person, his teacher for instance, or 
some one who had some claim of authority over 
him. One finds in such patients a strong in- 
clination to dominate over or torment others, at 
times sadistic phantasies, until one discovers that 
the compulsion to laughter, the lust for power and 
the sadism are erected over the weak point of the 
feeling of inferiority, in order to compensate for 
it. Pyromania, the delight in fire-brands and 
the almost irresistible compulsion to think of fire, 


CRUELTY, CONSCIENCE, ETC. 327 


or to cry out “fire” in the theater or church seem 
to be referable, according to certain of my find- 
ings, to defects of the sensitive bladder or to eyes 
oversensitive to light, or at any rate to prepara- 
tions for the compensation of these defects. But 
this guiding line of masculine cruelty is threat- 
ened with great danger and accident in a society 
where there exist ethical imperatives, it can, there- 
fore, be only followed in a disguised form. Usu- 
ally one sees deviations and circuitous paths in 
following which the sadistic trait seems wholly or 
in part lost. In this way the neurotic succeeds in 
gaining superiority over the weak, or he operates 
on this new line so skillfully as to manage to set 
up an aggression which enables him to dominate 
and torture others. In the compulsion neuroses 
one frequently finds that these patients have 
abandoned their sadistic guiding line and have 
turned to penance and reassuring measures,’ 
which have the same compulsory character and 
are not less oppressive for the environment than 
were the previous emotional predispositions of 
the patient, and hence are fitted in the same man- 
ner as prime characteristics to render obvious the 
superiority of the neurotic. In the major at- 
tacks of so-called affective epilepsy, of hysteria, 
of trigeminal neuralgia, of migraine, etc., the 
masculine lust for power turns in the direction of 
the neurotic “readiness for a paroxysm,” but the 


328 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


helplessness of the environment and its suffermg 
is not less but rather greater than in the rages and 
enmity which were active ways of the neurotic. 
An inclination for antivivisectionism, vegetarian- 
ism, prevention of cruelty to animals, charity, 
often distinguishes these connoisseurs of the suf- 
ferings of others, they cannot endure to see a 
goose bleed, but clap their hands gleefully when 
their opponent leaves the Exchange a bankrupt. 
Their inclination to sectarianism forms an inimi- 
cal antisocial trait, as does their severe criticism 
of the valuation of others which they exhibit be- 
fore they even form an opinion of their own. 
Tolerance is unknown to them, unless they cry 
out for it for themselves. 

If I sketch here traits which are to be en- 
countered on all sides, they are nevertheless traits 
of a very prevalent neuroticism and signs of a 
deeply grounded uncertainty. ‘They are by no 
means inherent in human nature, but are rather 
unsuccessful forms of the masculine protest which 
failed to bring assurance to the ego-consciousness. 
Should failure result in following the main guid- 
ing line, neurotic circuitous ways are entered 
upon and the “outbreak” of the neurosis or psy- 
chosis follows as a result of a change of form and 
accentuation of the guiding fiction. 

I must also disagree with the theory of con- 
genital criminality of children and criminals 


CRUELTY, CONSCIENCE, ETC. 329 


promulgated by Lombroso and Ferrari, as well as 
with Stekel’s theory of the universal criminality 
of neurotics. (Aggressionstrieb, |. c.). They 
are nothing but forms of the aggressive impulse 
become accentuated through the feeling of inferi- 
ority, and which makes use of the masculine guid- 
ing line. ‘The transformation into a clearly ob- 
vious neurosis follows the abandonment of this 
straightforward aggression. Where the fear of 
a decision is absent, an early result of the secu- 
rity-giving neurosis, and where there develops a 
strong tendency to deprive others of life, honor 
and property, criminality is the result.® 

In the developed neurosis, on the other hand, 
one finds memory-traces of cruelty, criminality as 
well as those of sexuality purposefully exagger- 
ated, falsely grouped and retained. Through 
the imagining of an accentuated conscience and 
exaggerated feeling of guilt, the masculine pro- 
test is diverted from the straight path of aggres- 
sion and becomes inclined towards routes of soft- 
heartedness. It is only in the affect which occa- 
sionally comes to the surface, in the analysis of 
the seizures, in the traits of character which be- 
come manifest now and then as is the case fre- 
quently at the onset of a psychosis and the nature 
of the goal of the neurotic subterfuges and traits 


3A. Jassny, “Dass Weib als Verbrecher,’ Arch. f. Kriminal- 
psych., 1911, H. 19. 


330 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


of character which have become diverted from the 
straight course, in the fact that a tyranny is 
erected in spite of all defeats, in the torture of 
others through self-torture, and finally in the in- 
termixture of occasionally emerging original and 
direct traits of aggression, that one discovers the 
fact that the old over-tense goal still exists and 
that a change in the form of the fiction has only 
diverted the direction of the original tendency 
into other, often apparently opposite channels. 
Thus it happens that following a decidedly ag- 
gressive period, the greedy, brutal or violent 
traits of the psychopath, in anticipation of a de- 
feat or after such has actually been experienced, 
may be made to approach more closely or even 
too eagerly general moral ideals, through the con- 
struction of a fictitious factor, “‘conscience,” in the 
same manner as the path of egocentric evil desire 
was entered upon from a feeling of inferiority. 
“Then I am destined to be bad,” in this and simi- 
lar ways the fictitious life-plan of many neurotics 
is unconsciously formed, until a glance into the 
abyss tears the giddy subject from his perilous po- 
sition and forces him to seek a stronger security 
than is actually needed. Conscience develops out 
of the simpler forms of prevision and self-evalu- 
ation under the pressure of the craving for se- 
curity, is endowed with the attributes of power 
and raised to a divinity, so that the individual may 


CRUELTY, CONSCIENCE, ETC. 331 


construct his ideal without objection from any 
side, so that he may be able better to orient him- 
self in the uncertainty of events and have his 
choice in attacks and methods of combat to which 
his will to power guides him. 

But the neurotic brings about a reconstruction 
of his traits of character even for the sole pur- 
pose of being enabled to initiate the struggle to 
better advantage. Such is the case when he 
ascribes to the sexual partner of whom he stands 
in fear, traits of an egotistic, cruel and deceptive 
nature. He is then likely to hunt out and exag- 
gerate from his memories and emotions, those 
which confirm his own character as affectionate, 
mild and open. For the purpose of proving 
these characteristics he will often act as though 
his virtues had the reality of innate and indestruc- 
tible qualities. 

One important question must still be touched 
upon. Nearly all of our neurotic patients come 
to us in the “stadium of virtue,” after having ex- 
perienced a defeat, and we must therefore expect 
to discover their masculine protest less in direct 
traits of character and emotional predispositions 
than in neurotic circuitous ways, accentuated se- 
curity devices, which may be detected only with 
difficulty through the analysis of their dreams and 
symptoms. One will discover that the infantile, 
fictive guiding line has only become more effec- 


332 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


tive, and in so far as it concerns the cases just 
spoken of, that their neurotic symptoms lead to 
a more intense degradation of others than did 
their original cruelty and desire to torture. For 
all these guiding lines are tensely stretched be- 
tween the insecurity of the constitutionally or 
subjectively defective individual and his unattain- 
able ego-ideal. However far back into childhood 
sadism, perversions of various sorts, sexual-libido, 
in short the masculine protest may extend, they 
are always constructed according to a life-plan 
and reveal their dependence thereon. The liber- 
ation of the sadism from the neurotic predisposi- 
tion, and in the sense of Freud, from the uncon- 
scious and from repression, is to be likened to a 
carrying back of the neurosis to an earlier sta- 
dium, to a time before the defeat. Freud’s scien- 
tific work, important and full of results as it was 
for the understanding of the neurosis, did not give 
a correct picture of the neurotic psyche. The 
neurotic predispositions of heightened affectivity, 
the exaggerated aggressiveness, the hypersensi- 
bility, and the direct, compensatory character- 
peculiarities require a liberation from their over- 
tense state; as do also the inclinations to neurotic 
perversions which are often constructed at a very 
early age, and which are to come to the aid of the 
general fear of decisions through a compromise 
formation. For this reason the effort should be 


CRUELTY, CONSCIENCE, ETC. 333 


made to conquer this feeling of inferiority and the 
tendency to disparage which results therefrom, 
these two important poles of every neurotic state, 
by means of insight and contemplation on the 
part of the patient, for they like their sexual anal- 
ogies, (sadism, masochism, fetichism, homosex- 
uality, incest-phantasies, apparent heightening or 
weakening of the sexual impulse), already form 
the foundation of the neurosis. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE ANTITHESIS ABOVE-BENEATH, CHOICE OF A 
PROFESSION, SOMNAMBULISM, ANTITHESIS IN 
THOUGHT, ELEVATION OF THE PERSONALITY 
THROUGH THE DISPARAGEMENT OF OTHERS, 
JEALOUSY, NEUROTIC AUXILIARIES, AUTHOR- 
ITATIVENESS, THINKING IN ANTITHESES AND 
THE MASCULINE PROTEST, DILATORY ATTI- 
TUDE AND MARRIAGE, THE TENDENCY UP- 
WARD AS A SYMBOL OF LIFE, COMPULSION TO 
MASTURBATION, THE NEUROTIC STRIVING FOR 
KNOW LEDGE 


THE abstraction of the concept, “above-be- 
neath,” obviously plays an extremely important 
role in the civilization of mankind, and is prob- 
ably even connected with the beginning of the up- 
right carriage of human beings. As every child 
repeats this process in the course of his develop- 
ment when he arises from the floor and as training 
also teaches him a disgust for clinging to the floor 
and creeping on it from hygienic reasons, for be- 
ing “down”; this higher development in childhood 
may contribute not a little to the tendency to 


value “up” more highly; a certain proof is to be 
334 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 335 


found in the conduct of small children who throw 
themselves on the floor angrily and thus try to 
make themselves dirty in order to attract the at- 
tention of their parents, but betray thereby that 
the idea of “being down” as a fiction of what is 
forbidden, dirty, sinful, is developing in them. 
In this psychic gesture of small children may also 
be detected the model for strongly developed later 
neurotic traits. 

Further notions may be gathered from the im- 
pressions of heavenly bodies, as may be seen from 
a psychological understanding of the various re- 
ligions and of civilization. The aboriginal races, 
like the child, regarded the sun, the day, joy, ele- 
vation, being “up,” as resembling each other and 
frequently associated “being down” with sin, 
death, dirt, sickness and night. 

The antithesis of “up-down” is not less distinct 
than in ancient religions. From a work by K. 
Th. Preuss on “Die Feuergötter als Ausgang- 
spunkt zum Verständniss der Mexicanischen Re- 
ligion,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen 
Gesellschaft in Wien, 1903, we are able to infer 
the deeply rooted character of this antithesis and 
the association of “up-down.” The fire god is 
also the god of the dead who live with him at the 
place of descent. 

Overturned vessels, people who fell, were re- 
garded as presentations of “up-downs,” that is to 


336 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


say, of falling into the realm of the dead, and 
thoughts of preservation and destructive activities 
were given this form of spatial antithesis.’ 
Further, sensations and impressions from 
childhood tend to give form to the spatial notion 
of “up-down” and to define the contrast more 
sharply. Falling, falling down, is painful, blam- 
able, dishonorable, ‘at times, punishable. Not 
rarely it is the result of inattention, lack of fore- 
sight and the child may therefore assume these 
sensory traces as an admonition, so that being 
“down” may be felt as a forceful expression for 
“fallen,” for inattention, for unskillfulness, for 
defeat, not without releasing or at least stimulat- 
ing the protest which is directed against the ap- 
proaching feeling of inferiority. In this cate- 
gory of “down-up,” one of which cannot be 
thought of without the other, is further found 
intermingled trains of thought (in both neurotics 
and normal persons), which express the anti- 
theses of conquest and defeat, of triumph and in- 
feriority. In individual cases upon analysis 
memory traces emerge of riding, swimming, fly- 
ing, mountain climbing, climbing up and of 
climbing staircases, the antitheses of which reveal 
themselves as carrying a rider, incubus, sinking 
in water, falling down, tumbling down, a check 


1I am especially indebted to Prof. Dr. S. Oppenheim for some 
important historical data for my work. 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 337 


in an upward or forward movement. ‘The more 
abstract and figurative the memory is in dreams, 
in hallucinations, in separate neurotic symptoms, 
the more perceptible are the transitions which 
show a sexual factor. In this connection the 
masculine principle is only represented by the 
feeling of greater power, as being “up,” and the 
feminine by the feeling of being “down.” It is 
easy to see that scuffling and its results support 
this valuation. 

In the games of children which are prepara- 
tory for the conflicts of life (Karl Groos) this 
striving “upwards” is regularly found. Also in 
the thoughts of children concerning a vocation. 
In the progress of the psychic development real- 
ity is seen working as a brake, so that the ab- 
straction “upwards” has a tendency to assume a 
concrete form in some. Very often in this con- 
nection caution in the form of fear of being in 
elevated positions is at work and changes the 
wish to be a roof maker into that of being a mas- 
ter builder, makes of the aviator a builder of 
flying machines, changes the wish of the little girl 
to be like her father into the more attainable wish 
of being able to command like her mother. 

The striving for security and the masculine 
protest make the greatest possible use of the re- 
sulting guiding lines of the “will to be up.” 
Under the pressure of the fiction the neurotic 1s 


338 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


sometimes forced to decisions, to conflict and 
strife, to passionate haste, sometimes to cautious, 
hesitating, doubting behavior. Thus he is placed 
in a position to make an estimate of his worth in 
life and that through instances which escape the 
notice of others. He must scent out, hold fast, 
exaggerate or arrange situations which seem to 
us of very little value. Let us follow this con- 
duct in detail. 

A girl, 25 years old, came to us with complaints 
of frequent headache, emotional attacks, disincli- 
nation for life and work. ‘Traces of rickets were 
perceptible. The history of childhood revealed 
an extreme feeling of inferiority which was kept 
at a strained tension because of the mother’s pref- 
erence for a younger brother and because of his 
intellectual superiority. The most cherished 
wish of this patient had always been to be big, 
very wise, anda man. She took the preparatory 
attitudes for the attainment of this masculine 
ego-consciousness as far as was possible from her 
father. When this was not possible for her, a 
small, stupid girl, she had secured the imaginary 
ego-consciousness through emotional expedients 
of rage and anger against her relatives and espe- 
cially in obstinacy toward her mother, in the 
simulation of stupidity, of awkwardness and sick- 
ness, and finally in the arrangement of laziness. 
I omit here the lines constructed by her of man- 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 339 


liness, of malice, of obstinacy, and refrain also 
from analyzing her overweening ambition, her 
inclination to lying and ostentation, and will con- 
tent myself with showing how all these habits are 
combined in the impulse to be “up” and serve 
the tendency to depreciate others. For this pur- 
pose I will refer to one of her dreams, which con- 
tains a modest reference to the psychology of 
somnambulism. ‘The dream is as follows: 


“I became a sleepwalker and climbed onto the 
head of everybody.” 


The patient had heard sleepwalkers spoken of 
a few days previous to this dream. In her at- 
tempt at explanation of this dream a series of 
ambitious thoughts emerged which takes the 
form among others of a sexual picture of domi- 
nation over her future husband. She remem- 
bered dreams of earlier times which represented 
her as riding on a man, on a horse.” I have 
never treated a real sleepwalker, but one finds 
this neurotic symptom sometimes indicated in on- 
sets. It is manifested as is the dream of flying, 
of climbing stairs, etc., as a dynamic expression 
of the “will to be up” in the sense of the manly 

2 Women riding on a man one frequently finds as the subject of 
paintings. I wish to call attention to Burgkmair, Hans Baldung, 


Grien, Diirer, and to tell of the many prints which show Alex- 
ander’s paramours riding on Aristotle. 


340 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ageression. In a patient who showed strong 
masochistic traits, I once discovered strenuous 
attempts to reach the ceiling of the room by put- 
ting his legs out on the wall during the night. 
The interpretation showed that the patient res- 
cued himself from a real or an imagined situ- 
ation which was regarded as feminine by turning 
around to the masculine protest and at the same 
time gave expression to this in a symbolic modus 
dicendi through his striving upwards. 

The second thought of the dream, “I climbed 
onto the heads of everybody,” reveals the same 
meaning. The patient makes use here of a form 
of speech to express that she is superior to all 
others. Her striving upwards is only to be un- 
derstood dialectically in an antithesis, for the 
thoughts of insecure neurotics generally move in 
strongly antithetical directions, in an “either-or,” 
in an abstraction understood according to the 
scheme of the opposites, masculine-feminine. 
The innumerable middle ways are not chosen be- 
cause the two neurotic poles, the feeling of infe- 
riority on the one hand and the overtense ego- 
consciousness on the other only permit the 
antithetical values to reach consciousness.? 

3 That the tentative, insecurely begun, beginnings in philosophy 


have likewise hypotasized this antithetical mode of thinking we 


have already emphasized. 
Karl Joél speaks of this problem in the “Geschichte der Zahl- 
prinzipien in der griechischen Philosophie” (Zeitschr. f. Philoso- 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 341 


The train of thought of this dream permits us 
to divine the neurotic predispositions of the pa- 
tient. In reality her masculine protest, her in- 
clination to belittle others, her ambition, her 
sensitiveness, defiance, unyieldingness, obstinacy, 
is sufficiently remarkable. The psychic signifi- 
cance of her headache is revealed in this dream. 
Previous analysis showed in fact that the symp- 
tom always made its appearance when there was 
a feeling of defeat, of belittlement, of emascula- 
tion—to speak in the words of the dream, when 
one “mounted her head.” In the phases of the 
headache, therefore, through the construction of 
these “expedients of pain” with consequent hal- 
lucinations of pain she strove to dominate all 
persons, especially her mother, and was able to 
enhance her ego-consciousness thereby in the 
same manner as she was able to do it through de- 
fiance, laziness, and obstinacy, only to a greater 
degree, in short, had thus mounted on the heads 
of others. 

In children the tendency to be up is unmis- 
takable and coincides with the wish to be big. 
They wish to be lifted up and like to climb on 
sofas, tables, boxes, and usually connect with 
this striving the idea of showing themselves un- 
phie und philos. Kritik. Bd. 97), and states in this study, “The 


real root of ‘antithesis’ lies in the instinctive, peculiar fixity of 
thought which only recognizes absolutes.” 


842 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


conquerably courageous, manly. How closely 
bordering on this is the tendency to depreciate 
others is shown by their joy when they succeed 
in being “bigger” than grown people. The 
heightening of the aggressive tendency is mani- 
fested in children who show neurotic symptoms 
at an early age by this exhibition. Thus it some- 
times happens that children in the consulting 
room of the physician constantly climb on tables 
and benches and thus reveal their contempt. 

The danger of falling, of accidents in striving 
upwards as well as the customary training to 
cowardice, force the majority of children to a 
change of form of the guiding line, or to neu- 
rotic, circuitous ways, whereby the fear of ele- 
vated positions and heights opposes itself as an 
admonition usually in a symbolical form to un- 
dertakings and ventures of all sorts, and thus 
becomes the foundation of a predisposition which 
has the appearance of a neurotic check on aggres- 
sion. At times the desire to be up is transposed 
for the most part to a tendency to depreciate 
' others. The tendency of those suffering from 
_ dementia pr&cox to change the furniture stands 
regularly in such close connection with the de- 
_ preciation of the surroundings that the suspicion 
is justified, that this is one of the fictitious, ab- 
stract, circuitous ways by which the psychotic 
enhances his ego-consciousness. In a trans- 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 343 


ferred form this placing of others in an inferior 
position is expressed in the tendency to calumny, 
especially, however, in neurotic jealousy and de- | 
lirium of jealousy. I discovered further an in- 
teresting sort of derogation in nervous subjects - 
in their care, their anxious behavior, in their fears 
for the fate of other people. They act as if | 
others were incapable of caring for themselves 
without their help. They are constantly giving 
advice, wish to do everything themselves, are al- 
ways finding new dangers and are never con- 
tented until others confide themselves entirely to 
their care. Neurotic parents are thus the cause 
of much harm, and in love and marriage much 
friction is caused in this manner. One of my pa- 
tients, who was run over twice in his childhood, 
associated his feeling of injured personality with 
this memory and whenever he crossed a street 
with another person he led that person anxiously 
over by the arm as though without his help his 
companion could not have crossed. Many per- 
sons are filled with fears when their relatives 
travel by rail, go swimming or canoeing, give 
their nurses constant instructions and continue 
their tendency to depreciation in exaggerated 
criticisms and corrections. In schools and in 
offices this nagging depreciation is always found 
in neurotic teachers and superiors. In the prac- 
tice of psychotherapy it is one of the main re- 


344 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


quirements to obviate predispositions of this sort, 
even when the patient provokes them. This re- 
quirement often amounts to a renunciation of au- 
thority. Every one who has become acquainted 
with the hypersensitiveness of neurotic subjects 
knows with what slight cause they feel themselves 
to be undervalued. One of my patients who suf- 
fered from hystero-epilepsy and always con- 
ducted himself as if he wished to place himself in 
an entirely subordinate position fell on one oc- 
casion unconscious before my door. In such 
“accidents” the tendency to undervaluation is 
clearly recognizable. While still in a confused 
condition he addressed me as “Teacher,” and 
stammered that he would bring a note. After 
the attack he told me that he had come unwill- 
ingly on that occasion. The analysis showed 
that he had come to regard me as a teacher in 
order to obtain the distance necessary for the con- 
flict, in order to be able to act as though he were 
obliged to come to the school and to bring a writ- 
ten excuse for his absence. After he had placed 
himself as far as his feelings were concerned in 
this situation of inferiority he could allow the 
compensatory expedients derived therefrom to 
come into play in order to belittle me. 

A girl 20 years old suffered from the compul- 
sory idea that she could not ride in a street-car 
because when she got in the thought always 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 345 


emerged that a man might get out at the same 
time and fall under the wheels. Analysis showed 
that this compulsory neurosis represented the 
masculine protest of the patient in the figure of 
being “above” corresponding with which the man 
must be “under,” deprived of value, and should 
bear the injuries which he imposes on women. 
In addition the exaggerated striving for security 
constructed the protection of anxiety which was 
intended to satisfy further the fear of the male. 
Even then when her superiority was assured she 
could not bring herself to decide on marriage, 
for her future husband would have a hard time 
with her—from this point of view one is able to 
understand the often incomprehensible striving 
of many neurotic girls and women to exact from 
their partners the greatest sacrifices and put them 
to the most severe tests, in so far as they hope to 
attain thereby an enhancement of their ego-con- 
sciousness to the point of an appearance of man- 
liness. 

Thinking in crude antitheses is therefore in 
itself a sign of uncertainty and adheres to the 
sole genuine antithesis, that between male and 
female. In this a judgment of worth is already 
given, which infuses itself unnoticed in every 
“antithesis” (Joel) because this antithesis is al- 
ways made in the figure of a dissection of the 
hermaphroditic form into a male and female half. 


346 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Plato has perhaps expressed this idea most 
purely. And human perception was unable until 
the time of Kant to disentangle itself from this 
self-made fiction. But the neurotically disposed 
child adheres to the oppositeness of the sexes and 
to the higher valuation of the male principle 
therewith connected in order to escape from un- 
certainty and in order to find a guiding line for 
his idea of egoistic worth. ‘Thus it happens that 
this guiding fiction contains a manly aspect, and 
that in all the experiences and strivings of neu- 
rotic individuals the masculine protest is revealed 
as the ordering principle and motive force. The 
antithesis of the sexes is admirably expressed in 
the above given symbol of the spatial opposites of 
“up-down.” And thus it becomes comprehensi- 
ble that in every one of our psychological analyses 
this expression of a sharp antithetical schema 
must somehow or other come to light. It is still 
an open question whether reénforcements of the 
antithesis have been acquired from the events of 
early childhood and the resulting impressions, 
from the observations of sexual relations in hu- 
man beings and animals, or whether the con- 
sciousness of the higher position of the male has 
been fixed by the normal situations of sexual re- 
lations. 

The “will to be above” of the neurotic woman 
is produced by her manly guiding idea and repre- 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING _ 347 


sents an attempt to identify herself with the man. 
The importunity and rigidity with which this 
takes place even in neurotic, circuitous ways testi- 
fies to the original uncertainty and fear of being 
“below,” undervalued, female. Thus the tran- 
scendental egoistic idea attains its powerful 
dominancy because it promises compensation, the 
overcoming of the feeling of inferiority, in the 
opposite direction. Every gesture then says, “I 
will be above, I will be a man because I am afraid 
as a woman of being oppressed and misused.” 
Ambition and envy are hereby strengthened and 
an unusually lively mistrust is awakened against 
every possibility of belittlement. Where there 
is real undervaluation, however, the masculine 
protest flashes forth and leads from slight and 
often from no cause to the well known, unpleas- 
ant frictions of the neurotic individual with his 
environment, in which the principal weapons of 
attack used to confirm the feeling of power are 
disputatiousness, love for justice, obstinate ad- 
herence to opinion and trust in penetration. 
And in this connection the tendency to “look be- 
neath” will never be absent, especially in times 
of uncertainty, the acute perception of affronts, 
neglects, undervaluations, and further than this 
arrangements of depression, anxiety, remorse, 
feeling of guilt and pangs of conscience. 
Stronger measures for security are applied and 


348 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


new neurotic symptoms and deviations are con- 
structed, the neurotic traits of character become 
more deeply seated and more abstract and the 
fully developed picture of the neurosis arises.‘ 
Thus the revolt for attaining a heightened ego- 
consciousness is fairly contrived, the introduction 
thereof is formed by the disease itself and by the 
predispositions to disease which in some way or 
other are made use of as means for attaining 
power in the environment. 

A patient, 21 years old, came under treatment 
because of extreme depression, loss of sleep and 
compulsory thoughts. It was ascertained that 
she had always had neurotic traits of character. 


4While writing this book I discovered in Alfred v. Berger’s 
“Hofrat Eysenhardt” an excellent example of the type just de- 
scribed in whom the striving to be above was especially well 
marked and whose lectures I would recommend to every psycho- 
therapeutist. One will find in this description a repetition of all 
we have said concerning this type of individual from a poet’s 
standpoint. The all too powerful elan of the father, the feeling 
of inferiority of the boy along with the compensatory masculine 
protest. The accentuation of sexual desire, of the will to power, 
the preparation for the patricide, fetichism, contentious tendency, 
the exaggerated assurance in the case of threatening defeat. The 
construction of remorse, self-reproach, hallucinations, and com- 
pulsory ideas as a revengeful annihilation of the authority of the 
State. The loss of a tooth and the exaggerated fear of woman as 
the result of a further accentuated masculine protest, and along 
with this the repeated arrangement of an exaggerated sexual desire, 
all of which is very impressive and obvious, a description of the 
neurotic subterfuge which reminds one of Dostoyeffsky’s descrip- 
tions and which requires no further elucidation. 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 349 


The compulsory neurosis broke out as her rela- 
tions with a man whom she wanted to marry be- 
came serious. The typical pathogenic situation 
brings the neurotic “no” to light, and while the 
patient was making her preparations for mar- 
riage, and did not hesitate with the affirmative 
answer, she arranged for the neurosis and con- 
ducted herself as if she did not wish to marry. 
In all these very numerous cases the next step 
is a condition which therefore takes the form, “If 
I were well, if I should overcome my present 
condition,” ete. (in men, often: “If I were po- 
tent’), “I would marry.” By this condition, 
which is equivalent to a vacillation, a doubt, to a 
special attitude of caution, the patient escapes all 
responsibility, has drawn the bolt in secret until 
something further happens, but may act as if he 
wishes to open the door. The traits of mistrust, 
of disputatiousness, of tyranny, and of wishing 
to be “above” are clearly revealed in the analysis, 
and one can easily comprehend that the fear of 
not being equal to the partner, the menace of 
feeling another superior in love or marriage ne- 
cessitates the secret retreat and constructs the 
neurotic symptom. Not rarely one finds a pur- 
poseful valuation of the person’s own sexuality 
from which without proof or with the assistance 
of memories which every one has at command, 


350 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


or by evoking unconscious falsifications the im- 
pression is sought that it is too little or too great 
to permit a marriage to be ventured on. 

The further communication of the patient ex- 
plained that she could undertake nothing be- 
cause whenever she began anything the thought 
emerged that it was useless because every one 
must die. As one sees, a nonsensical thought, 
which at the same time has sense, but above all 
brings time and development to a standstill and 
renders the entrance of the patient upon mar- 
riage impossible. In accordance with this the 
conviction that the patient only came to the phy- 
sician because she was forced to, that she had no 
hope of cure and only desired proof of her incura- 
bility followed as a matter of course. One of 
her dreams showed, much of this constellation. 
It was as follows: 


“A physician came to me who said I should 
jump and sing when thoughts of death came to 
me, then the thoughts would vanish. Then a 
child (hesitatingly), a large one is brought. It 
had pain and cried. It was given medicine so 
that it should become quiet and sleep.” 


The physician in the dream had once treated 
her as a child when she had scarlet fever. In 
the dream he used the words which she during her 
present illness had constantly heard from her 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 351 


relatives and from physicians. He gives her ad- 
vice of a kind which amounts to nothing. These 
thoughts are aimed at me and express the con- 
viction that all my measures will be useless. Of 
course this dream was dreamed during a night 
when she slept—for the first time after a period 
of insomnia. As the patient, however, saw in 
this fact a partial success of the treatment she 
realized with strong aggression my measures too 
were useless. The hesitation in emphasizing the 
“largeness” of the child shows on what the 
thoughts of the dreamer are dwelling, on a small, 
a newborn child. The expression, “a child is 
brought” (supply: into the world) is taken from 
the idea of giving birth and coincides with this 
in the outlined representation of the dream. The 
powder which is given to the child is the sleeping 
powder of the patient in a former treatment, an 
indication that pains also belong to the patient, 
to giving birth. In other words the patient here 
expresses: I cannot sleep because I think of giv- 
ing birth with its pains. Giving birth, pains, 
dying, in these she sees her fate and hence 
she thinks of dying in order to avoid giving 
birth. 

The exaggerated security against childbirth is 
a change of form and intensity of her masculine 
protest. In order to secure herself against the 
feminine röle she enters upon the neurotic devi- 


S02 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


ation, fixes her thought upon an anticipatory 
tendency on childbirth and death as admonitions 
and prefers to become a child, to take a powder 
rather than to be cured psychotherapeutically. 
Because her cure signifies her fitting herself into 
the feminine role. Now the conflict is turned 
more acutely against the physician who wishes to 
cure her insomnia. She must remain superior to 
him, must permit him to talk absurdities and dic- 
tate to him, that he should treat her with medi- 
cines as she had been treated when a child. The 
compulsory neurosis represents her reassuring 
philosophy of the vanity of everything under the 
sun. 

In our sort of neuropsychology one always 
gains the impression that the visible neurotic con- 
duct is directed straight to the final purpose, to 
the fictitious goal, as if one were examining one 
of the intermediary pictures in a cinematographic 
film. The problem consists in recognizing this 
conduct, that is, the symptoms, predispositions, 
and traits of character, and to learn to compre- 
hend their object. In every neurotic attitude the 
beginning and final purpose is concealed in its 
significance.” These facts form the foundation 

5 Bergson justly emphasizes the same thing for every move 
of life. One who possesses sufficient insight and experience is 
able to see in every psychic phenomenon the past, present, and 


future, but also the desired finale. Thus every psychic phenome- 
non and every trait of character, similarly to the inferior somatic 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 353 


of every individualistic psychological method and 
coincide with our other findings. Therefore in 
the analysis of a symptom or of a dream the 
feeling of effeminacy, of inferiority, of being 
“down,” and the masculine protest, the fictitious 
manly goal, the feeling of being “above,” will 
always be found indicated, in the form of an up- 
wardly directed psychic attitude, in a hermaph- 
roditic picture which is apperceived in a strongly 
antithetical manner, in neurotic, circuitous ways, 
which as such characterize the tendency to meet 
obstacles with expedients, or when analyzed re- 
veal at one time the tendency upwards, at another 
the tendency downwards in the alterations and 
vacillations of the psychic phenomena. Fre- 
quently this “will to be up” is expressed in a 
strongly figurative manner, especially in dreams, 
but also in symptoms, and takes the symbolic 
form of a race, of soaring, of climbing mountains, 
of emerging from water, etc., while the “down” 
is represented by falling, in short by a motion 
downwards. Just as frequently the figure or 
the fact of the sexual act is symbolically employed 
for the same expression. I will here give an ac- 
count of the dreams of a patient who had fears 
for his future as a man on account of his weak- 
ness and noticeably effeminate conduct. In a 


organ, is to be looked upon as a symbol of life, as an attempt at 
an ascendancy of the masculine protest. 


354 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


dream of his early childhood which for a long 
time filled him with fears he saw himself pursued 
by a bull. As a farmer’s son he understood at 
that early age that the male pursuer represented 
a race for a cow, that is, for the patient himself. 
When he was to enter school he directed his steps 
straight to the girls’ school and had to be taken 
to the boys’ school by force. He unconsciously 
regarded his life as a race, for which he con- 
stantly found preparations. When he was 
courting a girl his friend cut him out. When he 
contemplated marriage, he became afraid of the 
superiority of his wife, fell into the habit of com- 
pulsory masturbation, suffered from frequent 
pollutions, and fell victim to a tremor, which hin- 
dered his work and advancement in office. Nat- 
urally he set up the condition that he would only 
marry when he was cured, a thought which 
seemed to be wise and justified, but which per- 
mitted the patient to operate secretly against his 
marriage as behind a veil because he feared there- 
from a reduction of his ego-consciousness. The 
tremor represented to him the premonitions of a 
paralysis which he feared on account of his ex- 
cessive masturbation. After he had secured him- 
self in this manner he still felt the need of con- 
firmation of his incurability and went weeping to 
physicians. Our conversation revealed to me the 
picture of a restless, ambitious individual who 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 355 


wished constantly to detract from others, but who 
recoiled in fear from a serious decision. Amo- 
rous relations were also with him principally a 
means of assuring himself of his superior manli- 
ness. No matter how eagerly he courted a girl, 
the moment she met his addresses, she lost all 
charm for him. Besides as soon as he ap- 
proached an engagement he entered into other 
relations without prospect, or gave them a pros- 
pectless form and thus ran after his rejections in 
order to be able through the feeling of his lack 
of influence even vis-a-vis his future bride, to be 
able to regard himself as inferior. From this he 
constantly regained the impulse to work secretly 
against the apparently desired marriage. One 
of his dreams is as follows: 


“I was with my old friend and was speaking 
with him about a mutual friend. He said, ‘Of 
what use is his money to him, he has learned noth- 
ing?” 


The old friend, who had cut our patient out in 
the courtship of a girl, had failed in the Tech- 
nical school and had given up study. The pa- 
tient was superior to him for he had finished the 
course. He embraced the sublime principle, 
“Knowledge is more than money,” especially as 
this profession served his fiction to be “above” 
and comforted him. The mutual acquaintance 


356 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


is placed here instead of the rich girl who was 
courted by both. The contest begins anew. 
Our patient is declared victor by his rival. 

A second dream which occurred the same night 
makes this clearer. The patient dreamed: 


“As if I had caused the fall of a girl of lower 
standing and had dishonored her.” 


The fiction of this dream says a shade more 
clearly that he is “above.” The girl who was 
formerly courted is thus in the sense of the pa- 
tient brought down, made poor, and recognizes 
him as her master. 

I will here briefly mention that the occurrence 
of several dreams in a night signifies that vari- 
ous attempts at preliminary arrangements of ten- 
tative solutions of a problem are undertaken. It 
becomes regularly apparent that a single way is 
not sufficient for the guiding, egoistic idea of cau- 
tion, a fact which is easily comprehended in the 
case of neurotics. The dream then, under the 
influence of the more intensive craving for secur- 
ity becomes more abstract, more figurative, and 
one thus obtains in interpreting all the dreams of 
a night several psychic attitudes, from the com- 
parison of which the dynamic of the neurosis be- 
comes much clearer. In the above cited case the 
rival surrenders and the wealth of the girl—her 
power—is deprived of worth for him. The sec- 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 357 


ond dream deprives the girl also of power and 
places her in the position a woman that is “under” 
occupies, and this is done in the most far-fetched 
and abstract manner, so that nothing personal is 
left to the girl under consideration except her 
subordinate position. The patient besides ex- 
presses the thought that only an uneducated girl 
from the country serves his purpose, as he can 
always remain her master. The girl whom he 
wishes to make his wife frightens him because 
of her intelligence.6 This is the tendency of 
many neurotics, which causes them always to 
choose below their social level, and thus thoughts 
and facts come to pass such as choosing a prosti- 
tute or a little girl for love and marriage, ne- 
crophilic tendencies, etc. In all similar cases the 
tendency to detract from the partner is percepti- 
ble, which seeks to degrade the wife by the con- 
struction of mistrust, jealousy, tyranny, ethical 
principles and requirements. 

A further idea shown in a dream represents a 
race graphically: 


“I was riding in a railway car and looked out 
of the window to see if the dog was still running 
with the train. I thought that he had run himself 
to death, had fallen under the wheels. I felt 


6 Another dream of the same night may have dealt with the vio- 
lation of a girl. 


358 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


sorry for him. Then the idea struck me that I 
had another dog, but a clumsy one.” 


He had often ridden bicycle races with his old 
friend and rival and was usually left behind. 
Now as his friend occupies a position socially in- 
ferior to him, his friend “can run after him,” as 
one says in Vienna when a person gives himself 
airs. ‘The metamorphosis into a dog is a prod- 
uct of the tendency to derogation and is quite 
frequently met with. In a case of dementia 
precox I observed that the patient gave all dogs 
the names of women of importance. The dog 
also represented his future bride who also brought 
_ his superiority into question. Her death, more- 
over, would free him of his fear, just as he would 
also be free if she should listen to another suitor, 
as his suspicion often whispered to him was the 
case. “If she should fall under the wheels.” “If 
this should occur, it would cause him sorrow.” 
In the dream he regards this as having already 
happened and anticipates his sorrow. The 
“clumsy dog” is a girl who about this time had 
disgusted him by meeting his advances and for 
whom he no longer cared. 

His dislike for those above him is boundless 
and deep-seated. One night he dreamed: 


“Our singing society gave a concert. The di- 
rectors place was empty.” 


ANTITHETICAL MODE OF THINKING 359 


The society to which he belonged was on one 
occasion obliged to sing without a director be- 
cause the latter had missed the train. This situ- 
ation appeared to him better than any other. 
“We need no director,” he thought. This is his 
usual attitude in all situations in which he him- 
self is not the director. 

The impulse to masturbation in male neurotics 
corresponds in female neurotics to the tendency 
to avoid a decision and thereby to remain “up.” 
In the masturbation phantasies of girls the 
woman is often found to take the role of a man. 
Also the position which is taken therein is at 
times that of the man. In men masturbation 
serves, first, as proof that one can live alone, sec- 
ond, as a protection against and hindrance to 
sexual relations which on account of the superior- 
ity of the wife are feared and hence arises from 
the craving for security. If the situation neces- 
sitates stronger securities, impotence or the de- 
veloped neurosis makes its appearance, not as a 
consequence of renunciation of masturbation, but 
as a reénforced security. The masturbation 
phantasies in neurotics have often a masochistic 
or sadistic feature, according to the phase of the 
masculine protest which they aim to represent. 

Among the preparatory actions and neurotic 
expedients which are intended to serve to secure 
the position of being “up,” curiosity, impulse to 


360 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


investigation, the desire to see everything, the 
“voyeur” impulse mentioned by writers occupies 
a prominent place. These impulses are always a 
proof of a primary uncertainty for the compen- 
sation of which the guiding lines of investigation 
are brought in. They serve especially in devel- 
oped neuroses secondarily the purposes of dila- 
toriness to avoid a plan and a decision and are in 
life, especially in the erotic very often changed 
from a means to an end on which all the psychic 
activities are based. Investigation, the search for 
truth, the wish to understand everything, the well 
known neurotic thoroughness, these are then the 
traits which the ego-consciousness erects and must 
elevate or protect. 


CHAPTER VII 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST, HOMOSEX- 
UALITY AND PERVERSION AS A SYMBOL, MOD- 
ESTY AND EXHIBITIONISM, CONSTANCY AND 
INCONSTANCY, JEALOUSY 


A. PHENOMENON often noted in neurotics is 
their attitude towards the question of punctuality. 
In accordance with our analysis of neurotic 
pedantry the expectation is justified that a large 
number of punctual individuals will be found 
among neurotics. This is in fact the case. But 
it is easy to perceive that these patients play with 
the thought, how would it be if they should let 
others wait, a train of thought which indicates 
their opposition to others. There always re- 
mains in this attitude of punctuality so much of 
ageression that these patients exact the greatest 
punctuality from everybody without exception 
and in consequence are often in a position to put 
their expedients and neurotic preparedness to 
attacks into operation at the tardiness of others. 
In other cases it is found that pride compels them 
to come late regularly, and when others are 
obliged to wait and a flood of excuses is offered, 

361 


362 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


this is felt as an enhancement of the ego-con- 
sciousness. This tardiness is well fitted to form 
a substitute for the fear of decisions. The social 
fitness is greatly menaced and professional duties 
as well as relations with friends and loved ones 
are soon eliminated. Admonitions are entirely 
fruitless, because the obstinate attitude is only 
confirmed by them. © The neurotic is able to mas- 
ter the situation by his eternal tardiness and thus 
place before his relatives an insoluble problem. 
The choice of this line of character often follows 
in conformity with an analogy: “as I came into 
the world too late among my brothers and sis- 
ters,” “because I did not arrive later like my 
younger brother or sister.” It may be seen from 
this how, by this neurotic arrangement—the feel- 
ing of inferiority and the order of birth of the 
brothers and sisters—a broad and permanent 
basis of operation for the battle for superiority is 
gained. Patients who always come too early 
show also at other times the trait of impatience. 
Through a feeling of inferiority they are con- 
stantly in fear of other new losses and reassure 
themselves by believing in their “unlucky star.” 
In cases of these neurotics, too, the elder brother 
is often found as an opponent with whom they 
are engaged, as it were, in a race, an analogical 
fiction, but by no manner of means the causal 
factor of their conduct. 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 363 


Fictive rights of primogeniture become often 
for younger children the impetus for the enhance- 
ment of the egoistic idea, and in my experience 
second and later children show greater tendency 
to neuroses and psychoses, and certainly show 
greater ambition.’ In their neurotic conduct the 
figurative analogy of the story of Jacob and 
Esau comes to light, proving that the wish to be 
first is at the foundation of the situation. Their 
preparations and predispositions will always 
have as object to permit no one to have merit, 
to transform every relation by means of love and 
hate so that their superiority shall become appar- 
ent. The tendency to derogation exceeds all 
bounds. The individual of this type does not 
hesitate at harming himself if he can only harm 
others at the same time. In the formal change 
of the guiding line a view such as Cesar took is 
often arrived at, “Better first in a village than 
second in Rome,” better to play the leading role 
with the mother or father than to draw an un- 
known lottery ticket in marriage, etc. Hatred 
is frequently felt for superiors, teachers and phy- 
sicians. They are usually kill-joys in social 
gatherings, as soon as their superiority is not rec- 
ognized and they often break off every relation 
of friendship and love after a short time, if the 


1 Compare Frischauf, “The Psychology of the Younger Brother,” 
E. Reinhardt, Munich (in preparation). 


364 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


other parties to these relationships do not ac- 
knowledge themselves inferior. Very often their 
conduct is brusque and inimical from the start, 
because they are already at strife before the other 
person suspects it. They cannot endure to have 
any one stand or walk before them, and avoid 
every school examination, because the superiority 
of the person conducting the examination is un- 
endurable to them. That all these phenomena 
may finally be directed against the family en- 
vironment, and take the form of the view that 
the family must care for the patient is a further 
step towards the proof of the significance and 
importance of the egoistic idea for the patient. 
At times they operate with their neuroses as oth- 
ers carry on fortune hunting. 

Frequently the wish to be first, with the wife, 
is hidden in the neurotic efforts of a male patient 
and he hunts through her previous life with jeal- 
ousy and suspicion and constantly believes him- 
self deceived, or he eagerly keeps watch lest his 
wife should prefer another, the fear of the wife as 
the expression of the feeling of incomplete man- 
liness. ‘The neurotic only wants certainty in re- 
gard to this point and even goes so far as to put 
the wife to all sorts of tests. In the burning jeal- 
ousy which from this point on possesses the neu- 
rotic the expedients by which the wife is degraded 
follow of themselves and the egoistic feeling of 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 365 


the jealous neurotie is thereby so greatly ele- 
vated that he is often not in a condition to sepa- 
rate from the justly or unjustly accused person. 
This latter fact which is often met with is wholly 
dependent on the masculine guiding idea of the 
patient. He cannot endure the thought that one 
could abandon him and reconstructs the facts in 
such a way that he is hindered, by love, by pity, 
by fear of misfortune which might come to wife 
or children from taking the final step. 

Perhaps the striving to be first, to be master 
of all, is constructed on a feeling of inferiority 
based with justification or without it on smallness 
of stature or of the genital organs. In the de- 
veloped neurosis the patient through the arrange- 
ment of a neurotic symptom fails at a distance 
from the opportunity in which he was to have 
given proof. Asa frequent symptom of this sort 
I was able to observe compulsory blushing. 

In a less marked degree the tendency to be 
first is a universal human characteristic and con- 
comitant therewith is regularly found an incli- 
nation to conflict in all human beings. The 
competitive race begins even in earliest childhood 
and creates its psychic organs and reassuring 
traits of character. 'Thus one often finds in chil- 
dren the trait of character that they wish to be 
the first to eat or drink or that they like to run 
ahead in order to reach a place before others. 


366 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Not rarely at five years of age they carry on the 
play of trying to outrun every wagon and many 
child’s games owe their origin to the idea of com- 
petitive races. Many persons preserve this in- 
clination throughout their entire life in the form 
of an unconscious gesture, always wish to walk 
at the head in a company or hasten their steps 
when any one attempts to pass them on the 
street. In a transferred sense this tendency 
makes itself noticeable by the fact that those who 
possess it are given to hero-worship whereby the 
more profound sense comes to light of being him- 
self, also Heros, Achilles, Alexander, Hannibal, 
Cesar, Napoleon or Archimedes, and thus be- 
traying at the same time the guiding fiction and 
the original feeling of inferiority. The likeness 
to God also reveals itself as an active fiction and 
is manifested at times in fairy tales, in phantasy, 
and in the psychoses. We have emphasized that 
in this state of the predispositions and traits of 
character all bonds of friendship and love are 
threatened and when the stronger uncertainty 
requires it, forces the patient into doubt, makes 
him represent scarecrows or ideal forms by means 
of which he secures himself permanently from 
reality. A caricature of Cesar, he now seeks 
his mother, the small city, the lower relations, 
wanders at times restlessly from one place of 
residence to another as if the external relations 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 367 


were the cause of his dissatisfaction. In this 
developed neurosis the sexual appetite is fre- 
quently directed to children, persons of low sta- 
tion, maids; homosexuality, perverse inclinations 
or inclinations to masturbation are constructed 
and adhered to because the patient hopes thus 
more easily to master the situation. For the fear 
of a woman hinders a natural sexual relation to 
such an extent that the neurotic in order to avoid 
the defeat of which he stands in fear, arrives at 
the expedient of ejaculatio precow, of pollutions, 
and of impotence. 

The circumstances are similar in neurotic 
women of this type, in whom frequently rivalry 
in society with friends in the large city, with sis- 
ters, with a daughter and a daughter-in-law is 
secretly brewing, forces to neurotic securities 
and this causes illness. In male neurotics the 
social position leads to the development of a neu- 
rosis aS soon as precedence in society, in science 
or in amusement is called into question and con- 
tested. 

Where the feeling of inferiority of the younger 
child forms the fictitious guiding ideal according 
to the pattern of the first born or the earliest born 
the most varied real and apparent advantages 
incite the desire and envy of the younger child. 
Nearly always teachers will notice traits such as 
envy of the size of the older brother, of his growth 


368 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


of hair, of the size of his genital organs. That 
fictitious values are thereto given I was able to 
infer from the psychotherapeutic treatment of 
two brothers, of whom each had envied the other 
in childhood on account of the development of the 
genital organs. In the same manner the real 
preference of the elder brother or such as arises 
naturally from the situation becomes the point of 
attack. The fact that he is taken to the theater 
and on journeys, that he has more experience in 
the sexual problem, is sexually active, that he is 
preferred by girls and by the servants may fill 
the younger child, where there is a feeling of in- 
feriority, with the most profound bitterness. 
For this melancholy, at times a hopeless emo- 
tional condition, arose at a very early age in our 
patient and attained an incredible degree. At 
times there seems no prospect of victory in the 
competition. His manly tendency turns around 
toward the pseudomasochistic side* and seeks 
now to attain the manly goal by emphasizing the 
feelings of sickness and weakness, by yielding 
and submitting to an extreme degree in the hope 
of thus winning the protection of parents and 
those with more strength and to gain in this man- 
ner the desired security in life. I have seen cases 

2 According to our conception, every perversion and inversion 


is a simile, a symbol. For pseudomasochism see “The Psychic 
Treatment of Trigeminal Neuralgia,” 1. c. 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 369 


where protracted catarrh in childhood (Czerny’s 
exudative diathesis) was sustained by a combina- 
tion of the clearing of the throat and panting and 
led to sneezing fits and asthma (see Striimpell’s 
Asthma-theory) and in connection with which 
at the same time fictions of pregnancy and cas- 
tration and exaggerated anal sensitiveness ef- 
fected a homosexual factor which was to be un- 
derstood symbolically. In one of these cases the 
fictitious feminine presentation went so far that 
the patient came to identify himself with his 
younger sister by a change of form of the guiding 
line. And as the mother showed a noticeable in- 
clination always to be late, he took this fact and 
the wish that he had been born later in place of 
his younger sister as a guiding motive always to 
arrive late wherever he went, even when he came 
to me for treatment, a phenomenon which did not 
vanish when it was revealed, but only after a cure 
had been effected. In these feminine presenta- 
tions the masculine protest is striven after by a 
circuitous route, by following the feminine guid- 
ing line and is regularly accompanied by day 
dreams, sensitiveness, disputatiousness, discon- 
tent, and is also as a rule forced into side paths 
by fear of tests, of decisions, of the sexual part- 
ner, so that perverse tendencies, onanism and 
pollutions are frequently found. ‘The initial 
phenomena of inferiority of organs may disap- 


370 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


pear or only remain as a trace. Smallness and 
anomalies of the exterior genital organs may 
sometimes be discovered, but as a rule only re- 
veal themselves psychically in the fear of not 
being able to dominate the sexual partner. This 
emotional condition often leads to jealousy, tend- 
ency to torment and sadistic inclinations, by 
which it is sought to establish the proof of po- 
tency and of being loved. 

Often the pride of the patient is so great that 
he is himself not conscious of his jealousy. Ac- 
cording to our experience the solution of this 
psychic constellation is that the masculine pro- 
test in addition to other effects has also the effect 
of repressing jealousy in order to prevent a dimi- 
nution of personal worth. The consequence of 
this repression is not great, at most that the 
patient finds himself in ambiguous situations. 
Generally he acts as if he were jealous and often 
so plainly that every one else except the pa- 
tient knows it. At times, however, the jealousy 
is masked by depression, headache, refuge in soli- 
tude, ete. 

I will give still another dream of a patient who 
came under my treatment because of depression 
and anxiety in society, because in the partial in- 
terpretations undertaken by the patient this 
dream reveals many of the points just described 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 371 


of the competition of a neurotic with his older 
brother: 


“It seemed to me that I had made a bet with 
my brother Joseph to beat him to a certain place 
which was not distingushable in the dream. 

“T saw myself now suddenly in a little three- 
wheeled automobile on the road, and tried to di- 
rect the automobile as well as possible by means 
of a small apparatus similar to a key which I was 
only able to take between the thumb and index 
finger. I rode very insecurely and felt uncom- 
fortable. I got into by-paths on which I could 
go no farther. The people whom I met were as- 
tonished and laughed. I was forced to take the 
auto on my back and turn back to the road. 
There I rode farther in the same manner. 

“Suddenly I saw myself with my three-wheeled 
vehicle in the room of an inn which was well 
known to me and was situated on a mountain 
near my native place. I now shoved my automo- 
bile into a corner and troubled myself no more 
about it. My brother had arrived before me at 
the same inn and alongside there was sitting a 
well-known family who were deeply in debt, con- 
sisting of Mr. and Mrs. M and their two 
daughters. My brother and I paid no attention 
to them. Then Mr. M. came to our table, 








372 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


spoke with us, and finally we went to the table of 
the family which, however, was unpleasant to me. 

“The thought of a bet came up in the course of 
a conversation with my brother. He advised me 
not to bind myself at an early age to the flighty 
girl that I wished to marry and told me from his 
own experiences what ill results this can have to 
a man striving for success. I comprehended this 
and promised to act according to his advice. He 
took little stock in such promises. That incited 
me toabet. In early years before I knew what 
lay buried in the depths of his nature he seemed 
to be a model to me and I strove to become like 
him in character, mode of thought, and bearing. 
Now I see, that I must not pattern after him in 
many things, if I do not wish to follow in his foot- 
steps. 


“Tt is easier to reach one’s destination with an 
automobile than on foot. This auto, however, 
obviously represented the wife, to whom I had 
tied myself. A three-wheeled auto is less per- 
fect than a four-wheeled one, the former lacks 
something. Thus it is with a woman. Man is 
perfect. For that reason the antithesis, the small 
handle. In my earliest youth I was constantly 
seeking after something in girls. There was 
something I could not understand about them. 
Frequently we were led to go under a bridge and 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 373 


yet we did not know what we expected to see 
through the cracks above. At that time—I was 
perhaps five years old—I had not the slightest 
idea of sexual procedures (‘uncertainty’) and 
had also come upon no sexual aberration. I can, 
however, say that even at that time something 
drew me to girls, ‘the small handle on the auto’ 
indicated at the same time that I possessed a too 
small penis or none at all, for which reason the 
girl must be superior to me. 

“I came into by-paths with my auto, that is, 
through the woman, through which I could not 
pass and which brought me no nearer to the goal 
which I wished to attain, that is, no nearer to the 
summit of my efforts. 

“T took the auto on my back—the woman was 
thus more than ever above me. 

“The inn in which I finally found myself with 
my brother stood on the top of a mountain, this 
signified my burning desire for success in life, as 
I had expected it of my brother. 

“That I met with a family which was deeply in 
debt indicates that I had often had exaggerated 
thoughts concerning the cost of a wife to her hus- 
band and that the wife is too often the cause of 
running into debt. 

“It is clear to me also that trains of thought 
on masturbation (by-paths, being in debt) run 
through the dream, as well as the false connec- 


874 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


tion of masturbation and the stunting of the geni- 
tals. The latter I ascribe to my uncertainty in 
regard to my bride. Without knowing it I hit 
upon all sorts of expedients for getting rid of her 
(in the corner). My condition of depression 
serves the same purpose, to be liberated from my 
wife, to prove my superiority in life.” 

In our physiognomic of the soul we under- 
stand the theory of character to be this, we have 
already frequently spoken of those obvious and 
deep-seated wants which seek to support and 
maximate the ego-consciousness as an obtrusive 
proof of manliness, as if there were a constant 
fear of becoming “de-classed,” of the revelation 
of a feminine role. ‘Thus the exaggerated mod- 
esty of many neurotics, who can visit no public 
toilet, who suffer from inhibition of the flow of 
urine in the presence of others, who withdraw 
from female society on account of blushing or 
anxiety and palpitation of the heart, reveals to 
us the strained manly ambition, which supports 
itself against the original feeling of inferiority. 
The masculine protest of these patients, insecure 
to the core, forces them to this arrangement 
whose boundaries pass over into those of bash- 
fulness and awkwardness: or there is a concord- 
ance of these and other traits which may on oc- 
casion supplant each other. Often in neurotic 
persons of both sexes one finds an inability to go 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 375 


to the toilet in cases of great necessity before 
others. The greater modesty of women, espe- 
cially of neurotic women, in all relations of life 
originates from the fear which is implanted in 
them from earliest childhood that attention 
might be directed to their sex. I have often con- 
vinced myself that the performances of girls and 
women suffer considerably from this more or less 
unconscious impression, indeed that the progress 
in the mental development—just as is the case in 
male patients, who feel unmanly—the formation 
of social and professional relations and relations 
of love are immediately checked as soon as the 
patient comes into a “feminine” or subordinate 
role or presupposes this expectation in others. 
This fact is in no manner affected when ex- 
pressed or repressed sexual stimuli come to light 
as the apparent source of the checks of aggres- 
sion. They are similarly arranged, have the pur- 
pose of enhancing the fear of the partner and of 
permitting the retreat decided upon in the plan 
of life to be entered upon with certainty, are 
therefore also acts of foresight. The neurotic 
had already in childhood laid the foundation of 
this foresight and in it is reflected the feeling of 
shame as the guiding line of reassuring modesty 
and the prudery of civilization. The previous 
history of the patient reveals the exaggerated 
modesty and this is true at times of those who in 


376 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


other respects show a boyish nature, and the anx- 
iety of nervous children on being exposed may be 
observed in their conduct. ‘They exclude every 
one from the room and will lock the doors when 
they are going to undress. "This conduct is also 
often observed in boys who have grown up among 
girls. ‘The masculine protest of the latter is ex- 
pressed in these cases in the derogation of the 
boy, either purposely or unthinkingly until he 
goes so far as to hide his sex. For the develop- 
ment of the neuroses this expedient of cowardice 
has an unfavorable significance. It is equal to 
later castration thoughts and wishes of the neu- 
— rotic, wishes to be a woman, as soon as the fear 
of the wife seems actual, or as soon as he wishes 
to escape a decision. And it arises nevertheless 
originally from the compulsion of an exaggerated 
masculine protest, which is easily perceptible 
from the accompanying, often continuing traits 
of character, such as tyranny, burning ambition, 
the desire to have everything, to be first every- 
where; from the emotional predispositions to 
rage and anger and finally from the tendency to 
derogate and to too great foresight. 

If therefore neurotic modesty should be con- 
sidered equal to the secret attempt to play the 
man, this “consciousness of role” (Groos) is more 
clearly manifested in the apparently antithetical 
trait of character of shamelessness. In reality 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 877 


this latter line proves to be a reénforcement and 
continuation of the former, as an obtrusive re- 
minder to the environment that one is a man. 
The guiding idea, which causes the predisposition 
to or habit of exhibitionistic gestures, hence often 
insulting or tactless obtrusion in respect to the 
environment betrays in detail the strong mascu- 
line factor. ‘Thus it is when in nervous boys and 
men sexual exhibitionism breaks through or is 
expressed habitually in certain faults of toilette. 
In all similar cases one finds the belief in the 
_ power of the phallus constructed as in the an- 
tique religious cults as consciousness of power. 
Narcissistic traits are also regularly intermin- 
gled so that in these cases the attitude of con- 
quest, accompanied by coquetry, by the mability 
to believe in a refusal, attracts the attention. In 
shameless girls the trait is even more noticeable 
because it is unusual. In conversation, in dress, 
in behavior, at times only in small things, at times 
obscurely or in coprology they demonstrate their 
inability to adapt themselves to or to satisfy 
themselves with their feminine role. The basis 
of operation for both sexes is manifested then in 
such a way that each demands from the other 
recognition or an extreme submission. In the 
analysis of such neurotic girls, at times only in 
their dreams and symptoms is observed the child- 
ish expectation of a metamorphosis into a male 


378 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


and in other cases always as an attempted sub- 
stitute for the will to power, the wish to be above. 
If two persons of this sort meet, the result is not 
rarely that the reénforced masculine guiding line 
of the one affects the other preliminarily as a 
sort of miracle, a talisman, because in her guiding 
ideal the belief in the miraculousness and wonder 
working power of manliness is also contained. 
Thus there is often for both what seems a chance 
fulfilling of destiny, but which is really brought 
about by the power of their idea of personality. 
One often finds immodest conduct in neurotic 
girls as an anticipation of their fictitious expec- 
tation; they conduct themselves as if they were 
really a boy or a man, expose themselves naked 
or live out in neurotic symptoms, dreams and 
phantasies their masculine reincarnation. Often 
in such patients the attempt is observed to ascribe 
the miraculous power of the phallus by means of 
an alteration of form of the fiction to other parts 
of the body, for example to the hands, feet, 
breasts, which thus altered into male members are 
taken into especial favor as fetiches and enjoy a 
Narcissus-form worship, as often also the genital 
organs or the whole body. This fetichism is 
nearly always transferred to the articles of cloth- 
ing and constitutes a large part of the charm of 
fashion, from which we therefore must assume 
that this, like the fetichism itself, must be re- 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 379 


garded as a substitute of manliness with its 
larger sphere of usefulness, which has been lost 
but which is always to be sought. 

Like immodesty the deep-seated neurotic infi- 
delity of many sick patients is an imitation of 
the exaggerated, apperceived masculine image. 
It indicates to us one of the ways which the mas- 
culine goal is forced to take. It is, like many of 
the neurotic traits of character, often only ideal, 
a maker of humor or of the view of life (Marezi- 
nowsky) or extends only to the boundary where 
the reality of the female role begins. Much 
oftener the virtue of fidelity is chosen as the 
means of security in the fear of the man. Phan- 
tasies of infidelity, at times to the degree of hal- 
lucinations or dreams, often result where there 
is real or imagined subjection exacted by the hus- 
band. Phantasies of prostitution indicate in 
these cases the neurotic, exaggerated perspective 
concerning the power of the sexual appetite and 
serve the same purpose of gaining security. In 
general in patients who are prone to speak of 
their sexuality the suspicion is justified that they 
paint their bugbear with great exaggeration. 
The reality is always in their favor. In girls 
often the holy conviction of their infidelity occu- 
pies the foreground entirely. It may be there- 
from inferred that for them even a single man 
would be too much and that they wish to protect 


380 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


themselves from love and especially from mar- 
riage: “for where does my passion drive me?” 
The real infidelity of many persons, too, both 
men and women, is the result of the fear of the 
partner of whose superiority they are afraid. 
The understanding of the accompanying symp- 
toms, fear of solitude, fear of places, fear of so- 
ciety, etc., unsocial’conduct, fixation of faults of 
childhood and derogation of the opposite sex are 
other signs by which the masculine purpose of 
these traits of character is revealed. Often de- 
spised love gives rise to a feeling of a reduction 
of the egoistic sense to such a degree that hate, 
indifference or infidelity are the forms which the 
masculine protest assumes. 

In this place a few educational observations 
may be added, which I was in a position to make 
in regard to neurotics suffering from Jealousy. 
They all have reference to the search for proofs 
of the influence of the individual over the part- 
ner and every situation which is even half-way 
fitted for this purpose is made use of. The in- 
satiableness with which the neurotic tests his part- 
ner is an indication of the want of self-confidence, 
of his lack of self-esteem, of his uncertainty so 
that it is easy to be seen how his Jealous efforts 
serve to bring him more into notice, to attract 
more attention to himself and thus to secure his 
self-esteem. The old feeling of being disre- 


PUNCTUALITY, THE WILL TO BE FIRST 381 


garded and neglected is seen to be revived upon 
the slightest occasion together with the childish 
attitude of wishing to have everything, to obtain 
a proof of superiority from the partner. A 
glance, a word in company, an acknowledgment 
of a favor, a show of sympathy for a picture, for 
an author, for a relative, even a protective atti- 
tude towards servants may be taken as the cause 
of the operation. In severe cases the impression 
is distinctly given that the jealous individual 
cannot rest because he has no confidence in peace- 
ful happiness on account of his misfortune. 
Now the neurosis develops in which the effort is 
made to bend the partner by an arrangement of 
attacks, to arouse the sympathy of the partner, 
or the attack is intended as a punishment. 
Headaches, weeping fits, conditions of weakness, 
paralysis, attacks of anxiety and depression, si- 
lence, etc., have the same value as abandoment 
to alcoholism, masturbation, perversion and lewd- 
ness. ‘The lines of distrust and doubt—often 
about the legitimacy of the children—become 
more pronounced, outbreaks of wrath and scold- 
ing, mistrust of the entire opposite sex are regu- 
lar phenomena and reveal the other side of jeal- 
ousy as a preparation for the derogation of the 
other. Often pride prevents consciousness of 
jealousy; the conduct is the same. The situa- 
tion is not rarely made worse by the circumstance 


382 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


that the other party meets the helplessness of the 
jealous person with an unconscious satisfaction, 
thereby giving foundation to his feeling of su- 
periority and does not therefore find the right 
tone, the proper attitude to hold the jealousy at 
least within limits. Jealousy of children often 
leads to grave faults of education. The belief 
in miracles as a threat to the sexual organs 
through births or aging nearly always causes 
jealous excitement to be more strongly mani- 
fested in neurotically disposed persons. 


CHAPTER VIII 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER; THE IDEAL IN THE NEU- 
ROSIS; INSOMNIA AND COMPULSION TO SLEEP; 
NEUROTIC COMPARISON OF MAN AND WOMAN; 
FORMS OF THE FEAR OF THE WIFE 


In this striving of the neurotic for the attain- 
ment of the masculine guiding goal, one never 
misses the fact, as has already been emphasized, 
that the fear of a decision resolves itself into a 
fear of the opposite sex, that touchstone of the 
individual’s own power, the fulfiller of the guid- 
ing idea. One finds in the family life of boys 
and girls, in their play and phantasy, in their 
assortment of experiences of all kinds, in their 
day dreams and poems and in their living out 
of actual experiences preparations for the strug- 
gle for supremacy so early, with such abundance 
and such unity of purpose that in arriving at 
puberty secure determinants for love and mar- 
riage already exist and by these alone the choice 
and direction of their eroticism is defined within 
narrow limits. Let us consider now of what na- 
ture these determinants of love objects may be 
in neurotics. Among these should be mentioned 

383 


384 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


tyranny, hypersensitiveness, ambition, discon- 
tent and all the principal neurotic character- 
traits already described, the security-giving de- 
vices of mistrust, caution, jealousy and deroga- 
tory tendency which is everywhere seeking 
faults, the neurotic digressions and subterfuges 
which are at first directed against members of 
their own family, and which are intended, with 
this as a basis, to prove their own superiority or 
to facilitate the escape of the superiority of 
others. The neurotic device has its part in this 
and demands for love some quality which is dif- 
ficult of attainment or entirely out of reach, or 
that the sexual partner “shall supply that which 
is lacking” (Plato and many modern sexolo- 
gists), which is paramount to saying that the 
partner must fulfill or represent the “ego-ideal” 
which the other party to the contract has con- 
structed as a compensation. The normal child, 
too, expects from his future, and especially from 
the one chosen in love the fulfillment of his ideals. 
But in due course of time, after he has permitted 
himself to be driven by his “ideal” as a means to 
an end he is able to detach himself from it, de- 
scend to reality and reckon with the demands of 
reality. Not so with the neurotic. He is un- 
able to change his neurotic perspectives through 
his own power, he cannot dispense with his prin- 
ciples which have by now become fixed and rigid, 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 385 


he has no longer control over his traits of char- 
acter. Chained to his “idea” he brings his old, 
prejudices into his love-relations and behaves as 
though they ought to procure for him not reality 
but the security of his “idea,” the triumph of his 
strained masculine protest. And soon disillusion 
makes its appearance. For it is introduced by 
the neurotic himself as a protective measure, as 
a security against the prospective derogatory ef- 
fect of his fictive finale. ‘The disillusionment 
furnishes the adequate basis for a continuance of 
the strife against the partner, for a recognition 
of every opportunity for the degradation of the 
latter. For these were, after all, the most im- 
mediate goals of the old preparatory training. 
Unconsciously, the fear of the sexual partner 
hovers in the soul of the growing neurotic as 
though he anticipated in the approach of that 
event the end of his masculine fiction and with it 
the annihilation of his ego-consciousness, of his 
guiding star, of his security in the chaos of life. 
He creates for himself ideals in order to detract 
from reality. He screws his ego-consciousness, 
often in a narcissistic manner, as high as pos- 
sible in order to make every partner appear small 
by contrast. He surrounds himself with a wall 
of the most crass egotism in order to furnish the 
proof of his unfitness to himself and others. He 
arranges in a neurotic manner doubt, uncer- 


386 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


tainty, awkwardness, adheres to old faults of 
childhood and constructs new deficiencies in or- 
der to keep himself at a distance. He invents 
weaknesses, submissiveness, masochistic impulses 
in order to alarm himself. The power of the sex 
instinct becomes for him an “overvalued idea” 
(Wernicke), because he feels its need and apper- 
ceives his sexual desire as the superiority of the 
opposite sex. The neurotic is incapable of love, 
not because he has repressed his sexuality, but 
because his rigid predispositions lie in the direc- 
tion of his fiction, in the line towards power. 
The neurotic caricatures of Don Juan and Mes- 
salina are, notwithstanding their sexuality, neu- 
rotic. ‘Those who become inverts and perverts 
have already escaped the threatening cliffs and 
seek henceforth to make a virtue of necessity. 
And where thoughts of incest apparently effect 
a check on the erotic life, it can be shown that 
to the neurotic, who constantly fears a decision, 
this represents a secure refuge, that is, the secure 
way to the mother or father clothed in a sexual 
simile. 

The flight from the partner, especially the 
flight from the wife, succeeds better in those neu- 
rotics who have early succeeded in finding their 
way to a profession or who have turned to an 
artistic vocation. It is true that should they be 
threatened with a feminine röle, with defeat, the 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 387 


fear of a decision, of their future, of life, of death 
may overtake them in the midst of their labors. 
Frequently, however, some sort of tranquilizing 
occupation furnishes the neurotics the means se- 
curing his ego-consciousness, or his talents, in ef- 
fecting a formal change in his fiction, furnish him 
the opportunity to contest for the palm of mas- 
culinity in art. It is then not rare that the mo- 
tive and content of his artistic creations reflect 
that which has driven him into the security-giv- 
ing sphere of art, namely, the power of woman 
and his fear of the wife. 

The wonderfully effective charm which many 
myths, many creations of art and philosophy pos- 
sess for us, is in line with this; the fault of the 
woman, the banal “cherchez la femme,” in all 
evils. ‘The thought is expressed in a bizarre 
manner by Baudelaire, “I can form no idea of a 
beautiful woman without at the same imagining 
misfortune connected with her;” mythically and 
sublimely, in the story of Eve, traces of which 
have never been missing from poetry. “The 
Iliad” is built upon this foundation, as well as the 
“Thousand and One Nights,” and if one exam- 
ines more closely, every great and small artistic 
creation. What is its leading thought? Noth- 
ing less than to win a standpoint in the uncertain- 
ties of life, in the conflict with love, in the fear 
of woman. 


388 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Woman as a sphynx, as a demon, as a vam- 
pire, as a witch, as a man-murdering horror, as 
benefactress, in all these pictures is reflected the 
sexual impulse which has become over-excited by 
the masculine protest and which have their coun- 
terpart in the caricature of woman, in the obscene 
outpourings of gall, in anecdotes and degrading 
comparisons. Inthe same manner the neurotic, 
philistine male-consciousness and the desire for 
superiority forces to those firm convictions which 
would deny woman equal rights, sometimes even 
the right to existence. 

Another turn which neurotic trains of thought 
may take in seeking security from woman leads 
as a natural consequence away from reality and 
life. In line with this Schopenhauer was led to a 
denial of life, the present, all time. (The prepa- 
rations for this attitude originated in his un- 
friendly attitude towards his mother.) Many 
patients flee in a somewhat less consistent and 
methodical manner in their fear of woman, but 
they constantly hanker after the fulfillment of 
their fiction in phantasies and dreams which they 
weave about the future. Every neurotic shows 
this trait, wishes to illuminate and investigate 
the future in order to secure himself in good 
time. His cautious and anxious expectation 
gives the fundamental tone to future events, 
gray, somber, full of danger. For they must 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 389 


seem thus to him in order to be effective as in- 
centives. Now he is able to keep the greatest 
danger in sight, draw the lines of his character- 
traits and predispositions to the fineness of a hair 
in order to secure himself adequately. Now he 
believes to have discovered the road to his goal, 
and instead of ambition, longing after victory 
and triumph, honor, elevation, power and ad- 
miration, he allows his symptoms to become ef- 
fective. He experiences under the compulsion 
of his guiding principle, as a prophetic gift, what 
sober individuals experience through their fore- 
sight and estimation of reality. But with neu- 
rotie strivings of “anticipatory thinking,” atten- 
tion approaches problems and arranges them in 
accordance with the neurotic’s antithetical mode 
of apperception, which values a defeat as death, 
as inferiority, as effeminacy, and victory as im- 
mortality, higher values, masculine triumph, 
while the hundreds of other possibilities of life 
are annihilated by withdrawing them from atten- 
tion. In the same manner the way is entered 
upon to the anticipation of future triumph and 
terror as well as an hallucinatory reinforcement 
for the sake* of security. ‘The psychoses show 
this trend in a pure manner, melancholia and 
mania as anticipations of the pure antithesis 
“above-beneath,” dementia preecox, paranoia and 
cyclothyemia as a mixture. 


390 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The recognition and construction of traits of 
character now follow essentially in strict con- 
formity with the goal-idea. The accentuation of 
the traits of greed and economy is intended to 
prevent the abjectness of poverty, pedantry, to 
assure against difficulties, ethical traits of char- 
acter, against shame, and all of these against 
relations of love and marriage, against a subjec- 
tion to the partner, and at the same time furnish 
the possibility of an attack upon the partner, an 
ever ready excuse for his own depreciation of 
others. The device of the “principle of exclu- 
sion,” is held in the highest esteem, becomes a re- 
ligious or proverbial principle of life, of the high- 
est wisdom. ‘The uncertainties of our social sys- 
tem, ethical points of view and the difficulties at- 
tendant upon the rearing of children, furnish a 
welcome excuse for the construction of the 
boundaries of a natural and reasonable attitude 
towards life as narrowly as possible, while the ob- 
scurity and insolubility of the problems of hered- 
ity are distorted in a similar manner in order to 
justify an unwedded life. Many take refuge in 
religion, surrender their present life, excite their 
moral and ascetic instincts in order to become 
partakers in the happiness, in the triumph in the 
“beyond.” An asexual role is arranged and 
everything becomes a means for the attainment 
of the heightened ego-consciousness which is ren- 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 391 


dered possible by the neurotic perspective of life 
and its experiences. At times security is at- 
tained through a want of satisfaction in sexual 
relations, through a heightening of the disillu- 
sionment to a marked degree, a device to which 
the patient plainly lends his assistance. 

It is only another phase of the fear of the 
partner when the patient brings his predisposi- 
tions into play against the psychotherapeutist. 
The neurotic female patient combats the man in 
the physician at the same time, and seeks to es- 
cape his masculine influence which she often ap- 
perceives as most terrifying, looking at it as she 
does from a sexual point of view. The male 
neurotic secretly seeks to undermine the influence 
of the psychotherapeutist, which influence he ap- 
perceives as sexual superiority, and both conduct 
themselves during the course of the treatment as 
they had always conducted themselves whenever 
compelled to take an active part in life, or when- 
ever confronted by a decision. 

At times patients are found whose flight from 
woman is into the past. It is then that their in- 
terest for antiquities, heraldry, dead languages, 
etc., becomes very acute, and they often become 
quite skillful in this direction. This skill is ab- 
sent in those patients who instead turn their at- 
tention to grave-yards, death-notices and fu- 
nerals. 


392 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


I have already mentioned that the “motive of 
the fear of woman,” is the strongest incentive to 
art and phantasy. Permit me to quote an ab- 
stract from Grillparzer’s autobiography, which 
illuminates much of our thesis. 

“Like every well-made man I felt myself at- 
tracted by the beautiful half of mankind. I was, 
however, far too little satisfied with myself to be- 
lieve myself capable of making deep impressions 
in a short time. Could it have been the vague 
conception of the poet or of poetry, or was it the 
reserve of my nature, which when it does not 
repel, attracts, because of the spirit of contradic- 
tion? I would find myself deeply entangled 
while I still believed myself to be only at the 
first advances. ‘This promised both pleasure and 
pain near at hand, though mostly the latter, be- 
cause my real efforts had always been to preserve 
myself in that tranquil state which would not ren- 
der difficult, or even entirely prevent the ap- 
proach of my real goddess, art.” 

When both, artist and neurotic, regard the at- 
traction of woman as menacing, as dangerous, 
as a compulsion on account of the uncertainty of 
their triumph, when both regard amorous emo- 
tions as a subjection, it is only in conformity with 
the fundamental disposition that animates both. 
By which I do not at all intend to deny the reali- 
ties of these relations. An examination of love, 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 393 


be it ever so sober, reveals a mutual adaptation, 
a subjection of our will. To put forth, however, 
special efforts to unearth these, to think of them 
as something significant and to renounce, for this 
reason, the pleasurable yielding thereto, reveals 
unequivocally an unconquerable craving for self- 
assertion on the part of the person in question, 
which we have frequently shown to be the neu- 
rotic’s overcompensation for his neurotic feeling 
of inferiority. The guiding goal forbids the for- 
mation of fitting predispositions, or presents 
them only in the form of an unmeasurable maso- 
chistic exaggeration, which is in turn itself used 
as a protective measure. 

At times this craving for self-assertion seeks 
other channels as soon as it feels its own libidi- 
nous tension as the superior power of the partner. 
Wishes and efforts then emerge to escape this 
power through satiety, through orgies. Even 
castration wishes and intents, and similarly 
ascetic and repentant practices make their ap- 
pearance, such as flagellation, etc., incited by the 
unconquerable craving for security, all in order 
to win peace from the demon, love. Active, con- 
stantly recurring perversions, especially maso- 
chistic manifestations, can be explained in no 
other way. ‘They are an expression of the neces- 
sity of convincing one’s-self in detail of the sin- 
ister strength of the partner, in order to be able 


394 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


to construct out of this conviction of the strength 
of the other and of one’s own weakness an admon- 
ishing bugbear. The real result of this, the neu- 
rotic’s rectification of boundaries, is a strong 
deviation from the normal path, which path he 
fears most of all. The self-degradation thus ar- 
ranged now furnishes a stronger stimulus for the 
masculine protest and enhances it in line with the 
goal-idea. “It must be night, where Friedland’s 
stars shine.” Now, after these detours, his ef- 
forts are again directed along the paths of his 
neurotic goal, reveal sadistic admixtures and a 
strong purification fanaticism in case facts or 
fancies of a coprophilic nature play a role. Or 
the patient contends himself to create an appear- 
ance of justification for his neurotic detours by 
means of a struggle against the judgment of 
others, against the law, or often by having re- 
course to an unheard of logic, and in this way 
seeks again to prove his superiority. Thus it is 
in the arguments of inverts who in the same 
manner owe their neurotic deviation from nor- 
mality to their fear of the opposite sex. 

The prestige which it is sought to maintain, the 
masculine protest is always shoved into the fore- 
ground, until the enlightening analysis arrives at 
that point where in the memories of man the neu- 
rotically grouped thoughts come to light, i. e., 
that it is his inferiority, his underdeveloped geni- 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 395 


talia which will hinder him from obtaining vic- 
tory over woman; in the memories of female pa- 
tients this place is occupied by the feeling of in- 
feriority, by the neurotic terror of the feminine 
role. Along with these rediscovered trains of 
thought, which have their origin in the earliest 
years of childhood, one detects megalomanic 
ideas often in the shape of narcissism and exhibi- 
tionism. They are to be readily understood as 
preparatory attempts at compensation for the 
feeling of inferiority, such as are produced by the 
compulsion of the guiding fiction, as secondary 
neurotic formations which say, “I want to be a 
complete man.” The change of formula which 
this thought experiences in girls into the ideal, 
“I will excel all women” has already been men- 
tioned. 

I am able to present some of these relation- 
ships in the case of the following female patient. 
A 19-year-old girl came under my care for de- 
pression, suicidal ideas, insomnia and incapacity 
for work. She had become an artist in order to 
have a profession. With the exception of indica- 
tions of hereditary tuberculosis and myopia there 
were no discoverable bodily symptoms. The rel- 
atives described her as formerly an obstinate 
child who left home because she wished to be self- 
supporting. Her mother and her only older 
brother died of tuberculosis. 


396 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The commencement of the treatment was very 
difficult because the patient sat before me show- 
ing great indifference and answered none of my 
questions. Only at times did she express herself 
with a negative gesture, or answered with, “No.” 

I began to work cautiously, I explained to her 
that her indifference is identical with her general 
derogatory tendency, the same being true of her 
continued silence in my presence, her negativism, 
her “No,” all of which are part of this derogatory 
tendency now directed against me. I then en- 
deavor to show her that her conduct indicates her 
discontent with her feminine role against which 
she seeks to secure herself in this manner. She 
answers me constantly with, “No,” which I disre- 
gard as something to be expected and which is 
directed against me, the male, and proceed. 
Her depression began during her sojourn at a 
bathing resort. I now maintain with certainty 
that something must have happened there which 
had released this “No,” that is to say, something 
which had brusquely brought to her attention her 
feminine role. ‘Thereupon she related that more 
than a year ago she had been at another resort 
where she made the acquaintance of a young 
man, who was agreeable to her, and that tender- 
ness and kisses had followed. One evening the 
young man had fallen upon her as though he were 
insane and tried to approach her in an indecent 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 397 


manner. Whereupon she immediately left the 
place. I call her attention to the fact that she 
tore herself away at the moment when the young 
man wished definitely to force her by his be- 
havior into a feminine role and added the remark 
that she must have undergone a similar experi- 
ence during the present summer. She there- 
upon related to me that a guest at the resort 
whose acquaintance she had made a short time 
previously, had conducted himself towards her in 
the same manner as the afore mentioned young 
man. She left the place just as she had done 
the previous year. 

The “return of the identical’ (Nietzsche) 
Jeads to the belief that the patient must have had 
her part in the play since both times she helped 
herself out of the situation by a neurotic arrange- 
ment so as to break off at the same moment. In 
this connection the patient furnished valuable 
support in the statement that the kisses ex- 
changed had not irritated her. I showed her that 
she acquiesced as long as the feminine role did 
not enter the question. I explained to her that 
her initial courage was the masculine idea of con- 
quest in harmony with her masculine aim. At 
this stage her insomnia vanished. She communi- 
cated this remarkable improvement in her condi- 
tion with the detracting remark, that now she 

would like to sleep day and night. Those who, 


398 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


like myself, have learned to recognize the tense 
ageressiveness of patients during the progress 
of a psychotherapeutic course of treatment, an 
ageressiveness which is directed against all su- 
periors, in this instance against the masculine 
physician, and who have thus sharpened their 
perception for the manner in which neurotics ex- 
press themselves, will not misunderstand the ex- 
pression of our patient. The expression shows 
distinctly that she has detected the result of the 
treatment, but that she takes the trouble to de- 
tract with a light touch from this result and hence 
from me. She insinuatingly calls my attention 
to the fact that one evil has only been replaced 
by another. 

More closely questioned the patient stated that 
during her four weeks of insomnia she had con- 
stantly thought during her wakeful nights how 
worthless life was. We understand that she did 
not merely think of it, but had worked at it. 
Now when the male enemy in the form of the 
physician, whom she subjects to the same valua- 
tion as man generally, confronts her and lays 
bare her craving for security and thus under- 
mines her effort to gain security by means of her 
wakefulness, she tries, when forced to sleep, to 
belittle him by asserting a superfluity of sleep. 

Neurotic insomnia is a symbolic attempt to es- 
cape from the defenselessness of sleep and to 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 399 


keep in mind the securities against being under- 
neath. The dream is another form of this ef- 
fort, equal to a compromise, inasmuch as it covers 
as in sleep, the defenselessness and consequent 
feeling of inferiority by the masculine protest. 
The dream, according to my observation, always 
drives towards security and has therefore the 
function of forethought. That this is accom- 
plished through the medium of facts from ex- 
perience is easily comprehensible, and thus it is 
that in the dream content and dream thoughts 
the defeats which one has experienced come to 
light, a circumstance which has led Freud to the 
formation of his heuristically valuable but other- 
wise imperfect and one-sided theory of dreams. 

After a prolonged hesitation and after having 
her attention called to the negative significance 
of her hesitation, the patient brought a few days 
later the following dream: “I was in front of 
the ‘Steinhoff’ (Vienna's great insane asylum). 
I hurry past, as I see a dark form within.” 

In order to avoid all artificial influencing of 
the patient, especially in the interpretation of the 
dream, I avoid all explanations of my dream 
theory and only refer to the fact that the dream 
rouses trains of thoughts which betray again how 
the patient tries to secure herself against sleep 
which is felt by her to be a defenseless condition, 
and which recalls to her her defenselessness in re- 


400 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


gards to life. In cases such as the one just given, 
who wish above all to discuss the fear of the fem- 
inine role, I indicate that sleep may be felt as a 
feminine situation. 

The figure of speech, “lying in the arms of 
Morpheus,” the frequent sensation of being par- 
alyzed, of being crushed, the analysis of night- 
mares, etc., and the feminine trends which I am 
able to discover in all dreams, trends out of which 
the dream raises itself to the masculine protest, 
and where furthermore the advent of sleep- 
banishing consciousness awakens an individual 
thought-association suggesting a feminine situa- 
tion, prove with certainty the fact that every 
dream must reveal a progression from femininity 
to masculinity. ‘That not every dream is of such 
a nature as to convince the beginner of the cor- 
rectness of my conception, I have already em- 
phasized. This arises from the fact that in a 
sketch, and we must regard the dream as such, 
the sense and meaning of mere traces of ideas 
must be ferreted out and completed, a thing 
which is never difficult for the experienced. I 
teach the patient that he must regard the dream 
as he would the sketch of a painting, the details 
of which he is obliged to fill in according to his 
impressions. 

After this explanation the intelligent patient 
proceeded unassisted. “Steinhoff means insane. 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 401 


This point indicates that I am on the verge of 
insanity. But I hasten away. Then what you 
always tell me occurs to me, I am running away 
from my feminine röle. Hence becoming insane 
and the feminine role are the same thing.” I 
now lead her on to endeavor to force a meaning 
into the dream, and for this purpose make use of 
the patient’s spirit of rivalry which is known to 
me, in order to excite her zeal when difficulties 
present themselves by saying, “But one certainly 
ought to be able to understand something under 
that idea.” 

Patient: “Perhaps that it would be insane to 
play a feminine role?’ 

I: “That would be an answer to a question. 
What then must the question have been?” 

Patient: “You told me yesterday, I should 
not be afraid of my feminine röle.” 

I: “Therefore an answer directed against me, 
in line with our conversations, a conflict against 
the man. And the black figure?” 

Patient: “Perhaps death?’ 

I: “Try now to fit death into the situation.” 

This was difficult for the patient, although it is 
wholly clear that she has taken the fear of death 
as a figure for her flight from the feminine role, 
in order to present it in a sufficiently strong man- 
ner. The connection of sexuality and death is 
often spoken of in philosophy and poetry. ‘The 


402 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


analysis of neurotics often indicate this connec- 
tion in the sense of an affect-accentuating “con- 
ditional proposition.” 

The sense of the dream is now shown to be an 
expedient directed against the physician, which 
with our knowledge of the patient’s phantasy- 
life should be made to read: “It would be in- 
sane to submit to a man,—equal to death.” But 
according to her estimation, she had already sub- 
mitted by the fact that she slept since the begin- 
ning of the treatment. This dream therefore re- 
volts against sleep, and her derogatory remark 
that she would now like to sleep day and night, 
is in line with this. Therefore the neurotic pre- 
dispositions of this patient against the possibility 
of a man winning influence over her is laid bare, 
and it is shown that the patient acted and 
dreamed as though she were conscious of her 
guiding purpose.’ 

This essential predisposition, her tendency to 
detract, her longing for victory over men and her 
neurotic craving for security, which stands men- 
acing in the background with the terror of death 
and insanity, had also caused the development 
of the neurosis as a strengthened security. 
Through it the patient is unfitted for life. The 

ı Richard Wagner’s genius-like intuition in the song of Erda. 


“My life is dreaming, my dreaming is thinking, my thinking the 
control of knowledge.” 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 403 


neurotic apperception, which conjures up a con- 
nection between love, insanity and death has 
something of the ring of poetry. How firmly 
fixed this is in the thoughts of the patient is 
shown in her first account: the young man had 
fallen upon her as though he were insane. 

It is often learned from the anamneses of male 
neurotics that they had been under the influence 
of a strong woman, mother, teacher, sister, who 
therefore, instead of their feminine röle or ın ad- 
dition thereto, played a masculine one, were 
above, and to whom the environment did not 
deny recognition, sometimes even disapproba- 
tion, showing that they were really regarded as 
men. This circumstance also often tends to 
strengthen the uncertainty of the neurotically 
disposed child, who tries to arrive at a conviction 
of his manliness by understanding the sexual dif- 
ferences. Especially when one endeavors to 
gain security through knowledge a certain sex 
inquisitiveness forces him to constantly seek 
visual confirmation of his sexual superiority, a 
necessity of obtaining definite knowledge and 
full comprehension of the female organs which 
approaches the masculine guiding line more 
nearly, in proportion as it is created out of prep- 
arations for the future. 

His pathological uncertainty adheres to the 
neurotic as a pretext and confirmation of his 


404 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


fear of woman even after he is married, so that 
the expression is often heard, that the feminine 
sexual apparatus, the condition of virginity, 
legitimacy of children, fatherhood, is a mystery 
just as a woman herself is. Along with this de- 
sire to obtain satisfaction through visual percep- 
tion of the female organs, there is at times as- 
sociated in neurotitally disposed children a sort 
of sinister feeling of danger, as though obscure 
thoughts arose in the mind of the boy that his 
future life, his victory or defeat were dependent 
upon the solution he has reached concerning the 
sexual question. It is in the nature of things, 
that frequently the opportunity for this sort of 
visual confirmation is only offered when the 
woman occupies a position above the boy. Even 
this small circumstance forms, as I have re- 
peatedly stated, a figurative representation of the 
feminine superiority in the phantasy of the neu- 
rotic individual who stands in fear of woman. 
Ganghofer and Stendhal give accounts in the his- 
tory of their childhood of these terrifying experi- 
ences which, it is thought left behind permanent 
traces. The terror was in itself already a secu- 
rity of the injured masculine prestige, and the 
exciting scene remained as an admonition, to be 
understood figuratively, of caution in regard to 
women. Frequently the derogatory tendency 
sets in at the point where the superiority of 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 405 


woman assumes a threatening aspect and leads to 
a comparison of male and female advantages and 
disadvantages. The abstract and figurative rep- 
resentation of the inferiority of woman, in 
dreams, phantasies, wit and science, frequently 
resorts to the mode of expression of a lost mem- 
ber, of supernumerary cavities. One of my pa- 
tients who suffered from vertigo had a dream one 
time following an unusually stormy scene with 
his wife which summarily and essentially brought 
about a degradation of his domineering wife. 


“The picture of a birch trunk emerged. At 
one point there was a branch with a round swell- 
ing. There a twig had fallen off and I had the 
impression as though this was a female genital 
organ.” 


I have already discussed such dreams, as have 
others also. ‘Io me such dreams represent figur- 
atively the question concerning the differences of 
sex, which is answered after the manner of chil- 
dren that the girl is a boy who has been deprived 
of the male organ. ‘The above dream fits into the 
psychic situation of the dreamer, inasmuch as it 
reveals the thought, “I am a man who has been 
deprived of manliness, who is weak and ill, who 
is in danger of being under, of falling beneath.” 
Now he has the basis of operation, he beholds his 
prestige diminished and takes breath, for the ef- 


406 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


fort again to regain power. The masculine pro- 
test now sets in in waking hours as tyranny, out- 
breaks of rage and acts of infidelity. 

It might be mentioned in this connection that 
one often hears from neurotics that in moments 
of personal danger or when they are threatened 
with defeat, they perceive a shortening or con- 
traction of the genitals, at times also a feeling of 
pain which forcibly impels them to a termination 
of the situation.” These phenomena most fre- 
quently accompany states of anxiety in high 
places where there is fear of falling. The short- 
ening of the genitals in the bath nearly always 


causes a reaction in the neurotic individual. He © 


feels out of sorts and at times experiences pres- 
sure in the head. 

I have already emphasized that homosexuality 
as a tendency and behavior is the result of the 
fear of the opposite sex. In addition it may 
be briefly mentioned that the over-valuation 
of the homosexual partner serves also to raise 
the neurotic invert in his own estimation. In 
neuroses homosexuality even when carried into 
practice is always found to be a symbol by means 
of which it is sought to place the individual’s own 

2 At times this feeling of pressure extends to the abdomen, to 
the breast and cardiac region—or affects only these regions, at 


times pollutions take place as reactive symbols of the masculine 
goal. 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 407 


superiority beyond question. This mechanism is 
similar to that of a religious psychosis in which 
the nearness of God has the significance of an 
elevation. 

One of the forms which the fear of woman is 
especially likely to take is syphilophobia. The 
train of thought of such phobists (Adler, syphilid- 
ophobia, |. c.) is usually the following: They 
fear that they will not be able to play a dominat- 
ing part in regard to woman because of some feel- 
ing of inferiority, for which they have ready all 
sorts of foundations, at times without conscious 
motivation. In this manner, following the in- 
creasing trend to belittle woman, they arrive at 
suspicious trains of thought which are to se- 
cure them against sexual relations. Sometimes 
woman is a riddle, sometimes a criminal being, 
always thinking of adornment and expense and 
sexually insatiable. The suspicions constantly 
arise that a girl is only hunting for support, is 
bent on capturing the man, is crafty and cunning 
and always bent on evil. These trains of thought 
are universal and are found at all periods of his- 
tory. They emerge in the most sublime and the 
lowest creations of art, have a place in the 
thoughts and efforts of the wisest, and create in 
man and in society a constant predisposition 
which develops suspicious and cautious traits, in 
order to always keep in touch with the enemy and 


408 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


to be in good time for the defense against knavish 
attacks. It is an error to think that it is only the 
man who harbors distrust of his sexual partner. 
The same trait is found also in the woman, often 
less distinct in character, when fictions of her own 
strength put a check to the doubt of her own 
value, but flashing up most strongly, when the 
feeling of degradation becomes overpowering. 
In the disputes of pious savants of the middle 
ages, questions arose as to whether woman had a 
soul, whether she was a human being, and the 
general prevalence of similar thoughts is re- 
flected in the insane burning of witches in the cen- 
turies following to which government, church 
and the blinded populace lent a hand. This de- 
traction from women in hate as well as in love 
which recurs constantly in Christian, Jewish and 
Mohammedan religious usages, break out irre- 
sistibly in the timorous, uncertain man and so 
completely fills the world of thought of the neu- 
rotic, that the most accentuated trait of character 
in the neurotic psyche is found to be the tendency 
to detract from the sexual partner. ‘Thus the 
outposts which offer security to the ego-con- 
sciousness become established and the peculiar 
play of the neurotic traits of character begins. 
Continuous testing, feeling, attempts to subju- 
gate, to find fault with and to degrade the part- 
ner set in, always favored by the fact that at- 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 409 


tention and interest is directed to a single pur- 
pose, to keep in touch with the enemy and to pre- 
vent a surprise. As long as the tendency to de- 
traction with its outward expressions, distrust, 
fear, jealousy, tyranny exists there is no hope of 
a cure of the neurotic. As we have seen worthy 
creations of art and literature which have received 
recognition on all sides owe their origin to this 
tendency. From the “Lysistrata” to the “kreu- 
zel writers” leads the same path as from the 
Gorgo Medusa to the Syphilis fad, which arose 
before the eyes of Lenans or Ganghofer. The 
guiding line which prevails in Tolstoi’s Kreuzer 
Sonata and which strives after the degradation 
of woman was perceptible even in his boyhood 
when he shoved his future bride out of the win- 
dow. An old guiding line which is revealed in 
the myth of the poison-girl * of antiquity, in the 
middle ages and in the beginning of modern 
times in the fear of witches, demons, vampires 
and sprites has undergone a change of form and 
has become the syphilophobia of to-day. Poggio 
relates of a man who had violated a girl. The 
girl changed into a devil and vanished with a 
stench. 

All these trains of thought returning in the 
same manner as they do in the dream and in the 


3 Wilhelm Hertz, “The Myth of the Poison-girl.” Abh. d. bayer 
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1897. 


410 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


psyche of the neurotic, reveal the cautious man, 
doubtful of his manliness, who seeks to secure 
himself from real life just as much by the setting 
up of scarecrows as by the fear he has of this 
life itself, because of the veneration of an ideal. 

The bantering note in such an attitude toward 
woman is of little significance in so far as our 
view is concerned. It shows moreover an effort 
to be guilty of no exaggeration, to preserve de- 
corum and to save one’s self from ridicule by a 
spirit of wit. The case is similar to that of Gogol 
whose strong craving for security is perceptible 
in every vein of his poetry. In his “Jahrmarkt 
von Sorotschinsk” * he makes a character say, 
“Lord in heaven, why dost thou punish us poor 
sinners so? ‘There is already so much trouble, 
why didst thou also send women into the world?” 
In the “Dead Souls” of this great poet, who was 
neurotic during his entire life, suffered from 
compulsory masturbation and died in a mad 
house, he makes his hero reflect on seeing a young 
girl: 

“A superb little woman! ‘The best about her 
is that she seems to have just come out of a board- 
ing school or institute and as yet has none of 
those special feminine traits that disfigure the 
whole sex. She is still a pure child, everything 
about her is straight-forward and simple; she 

4 From O. Kaus, “The Case of Gogol,” Munchen, Reinhardt, 1912. 


FEAR OF THE PARTNER, ETC. 411 


speaks from her heart and laughs when she feels 
like it. All possibilities lie in her nature; she 
may become a superb creature but she may be- 
come a stunted being and that will probably be 
the result when the aunts and mammas set them- 
selves to educate her. They will stuff her so full 
of their woman’s nonsense in a year that her own 
father would no longer recognize her. She will 
acquire a pompous and affected nature, will turn 
and move and courtesy according to rules learned 
by heart, rack her brains over the questions, what 
to say, how much to say, and with whom to speak, 
and how she shall look at her cavalier, etc., she 
will constantly be in the greatest anxiety lest she 
may have spoken some superfluous word, and 
finally will no longer know what she ought to do 
and will go wandering through life, a great lie. 
Fie! the devil!— For the rest I would like to 
know, of what sort she is!” 


CHAPTER IX 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, CONTRITION 
AND ASCETICISM, FLAGELLATION, NEUROSES 
IN CHILDREN 3.SUICIDE AND SUICIDAL IDEAS 


Unxper the forms of the neurotic lines of con- 
duct for the purpose of securing the masculine 
protest, trends of self-execration, self-reproach, 
self-torture and suicide appear in marked accent- 
uation. Our astonishment loses in force as soon 
as we see that the whole arrangement of the neu- 
rosis follows the trait of self-torture, that the neu- 
rosis is a self-torturing expedient whose purpose 
it is to enhance the feeling of personal esteem. 
In fact, the first stirrings of the aggressive ten- 
dency which is directed against the individual’s 
own person, originate in the child from a situa- 
tion in which the child through disease, death, 
shame and all sorts of constructed deficiencies 
seeks to prepare pain for the parents or to keep 
himself in their mind. This trait already char- 
acterizes the neurotically disposed child who has 
formed expedients out of the reminiscences of the 
phenomena of somatic inferiority and out of their 


significance for the maximation of the ego-con- 
412 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 413 


sciousness, for the purpose of increasing the ten- 
derness and interest of the parents. The devel- 
oped neurosis builds up these expedients and in- 
troduces their activity through a reinforcement 
of the fiction, as soon as this is demanded by the 
growing feeling of insecurity. It is well known 
how strong exacerbations take a hand in this, 
how the hallucinatory character, the anticipatory 
force of the neurotic assists in this and how the 
situation of the attack and the disturbances of 
health with the resultant dominancy over the en- 
vironment takes place. Paradoxical as it may 
seem at first glance the neurotic is only at peace 
when he has an attack behind him. Janet has 
already called attention to this fact; I can only 
add as the basis for it that it is because he has 
then gained the security of his superiority, if only 
for a short time. 

The trait of character of wishing to excel all 
others is also contained in the feeling to which 
the neurotic constantly gives expression, that he 
excels all others in pain. He uses this convic- 
tion because it furnishes him with a basis of oper- 
ation for feeling himself in opposition to others, 
for avoiding a decision or for making an attack. 
Thus it happens also that attacks, pains, or a dis- 
ease are wished for, when the situation demands 
it. Sometimes the wish alone serves the purpose 
of an attack, when as a reminder it already ter- 


414) THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


rifies the environment. For the patient’s own 
psyche it is at times sufficient, as a female patient 
once told me, if a phantasy is formed as result of 
which the neurotic suffers pain through the acts 
of another. This brings about the feeling of 
suppression or mistreatment, awakens the crav- 
ing for security and introduces the masculine 
protest. 

The significance of the feeling of guilt, of the 
conscience and self-reproaches as forms of secur- 
ity-giving fictions has already been described. 
Not rarely one finds in the psychology of mas- 
turbation an admixture of traits of atonement and 
of a desire to harm, the latter to be likened to an 
obstinate revolt against the parents, the former 
as a cheap pretext or sanctimonious act. 

The injuring of others through atonement is 
one of the most subtle expedients of the neurotic, 
for example when he launches forth in self- 
curses. Ideas of suicide often reveal the same 
mechanism, which is clearly seen in joint suicides. 
When one of my patients was treated by another 
physician with cold douches for impotence, he 
expressed the wish “that the physician might 
tear, injure his genitals.” When two years be- 
fore he suffered great losses in business he wished 
to commit suicide, although he was still a rich 
man. The motive force of these execrations 
(v. Shylock) is neurotic avarice. The analysis 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 415 


offers a complete explanation. In order to pro- 
tect himself from expenses for girls he execrates 
himself also when he is obliged to pay physicians’ 
fees. This is certainly accompanied by a half 
conscious feeling that his wishes need not be ab- 
solutely fulfilled. He execrates especially his 
levity for this is the meaning of his self-re- 
proaches and execrations, when he has paid a 
large account or ought to pay one. ‘Then every 
small expense disturbs him. 

He fears the charm of sexuality. Even his 
own sister he would like to throw into misfortune, 
or his sister’s daughter, both of whom lived with 
him. At the same time he must have estimated 
his execrations as of very little importance or 
perhaps even expected the opposite. This is 
shown by the great number of his measures for 
security, among which the self-execrations only 
played an insignificant part. He secures him- 
self to a much greater extent through the ar- 
rangement of impotence. Self-detraction and 
self-torture our patient constructed in the same 
manner as hypochondria, in order to hold before 
his eyes the feeling of his own inferiority, to feel 
himself too weak, too small, too unworthy. 
_ They appear as hindrances and in this way take 
the place of doubts. Neurotic girls who fear the 
man, who do not wish to play a feminine rdle, 
worry constantly over their growth of hair, their 


416 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


birth marks and fear their children might be 
similarly deformed. In many cases they were 
homely children or were slighted for a preferred 
brother when they were small girls. In one of 
my female patients with a compulsion neurosis, 
her compulsory thought was revealed as belief in 
an enlargement of the pores of her skin, to be 
understood symbolically as a security against the 
feminine role. Another form of self-torture is 
manifested in the tendency to atonements. 
They may be recognized as simple cravings for 
security when it is taken into consideration that 
these patients seek just as little as those with the 
allied feeling of remorse for the past, to change 
or better things in the future. 

The symptom clearly aims at the future, and 
this just as much when it reveals itself as of per- 
sonal emotion in individual form and conduct as 
when it is revealed socially in religious perform- 
ances. As in all forms of craving for security, 
in this case too, it is not at all excluded that re- 
cently experienced evil thoughts and acts come 
to light. Its purpose is to become effective as a 
restraining admonition and to serve as proof of 
the worthy intentions of the one concerned. Not 
last of all in this self-inspection is the impulse to 
atonement and the emphasis of inner good quali- 
ties wherein the contrast to other people is al- 
ways thought of, so much so, that the tendency 





SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 417 


to atonement and remorse at times betrays a 
strongly antagonistic, intractable, inimical note. 
The epidemic character of acts of atonement is 
scarcely ever without this pomp, people vie with 
each other in crying out, in weeping, in self-tor- 
ture and contrition. 

The possibility therefore of gaining a feeling 
of superiority by means of fasting and praying, 
wearing of sack cloth and ashes, etc., will have a 
charm for weak souls as soon as they have the in- 
clination to appear pious and good, religious and 
sublime. And asceticism will lead to an eleva- 
tion when it is felt as a triumph, in my sense, as 
a masculine protest. That in all this there is 
only an arbitrary valuation, in which frequently 
the contrast to otherwise superior people is taken 
as the point of departure, is revealed in the coun- 
terparts to the God fearing type, in atheists, mili- 
tant free thinkers and iconoclasts who seek to 
demonstrate their superiority in the same manner 
as the former. Lichtenberg’s expression is to be 
understood in this sense when he remarks, how 
rare are the people who live up to the principles 
of their religion, and how numerous those who 
fight for them. The conversion from militant 
free thinking to orthodoxy is not rare as is also 
not rare the conversion from Epicurianism to 
Asceticism. 

Along with this craving for security by means 


418 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


of atonement the masculine protest plays a röle 
as a guide which should not be underestimated. 
But one must still keep in sight the building ma- 
terial, the possibilities dormant in the psyche, of 
which it makes use in order to reach expression. 
There is no doubt that along with this, acts and 
thoughts of self-subjection come to light, that is, 
masochistic elements, which according to our way 
of looking at the subject are estimated as fem- 
inine elements of the masculine psyche. How 
incompatible these are with the consciousness of 
mankind and the fact that they constantly de- 
mand a change of direction in the masculine pro- 
test, that therefore, they are pseudo-masochistic 
phenomena, is seen from the fact that this sub- 
jection is connected with a soaring, an elevation. 
The lines of force also in this case were from be- 
low upwards because the person who has made 
atonement feels himself elevated or cleansed, he 
speaks with his God, he comes nearer to him than 
others, than at other times, and “joy in the king- 
dom of heaven awaits him.” 

One of my patients “punished herself” after 
the death of her mother, 72 years of age, with 
whom she had always lived at strife and to whom 
she would have been justified in making re- 
proaches, by deep feelings of remorse because of 
her indifference for her mother, and by sleepless- 
ness. Her feelings of remorse had the character 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 419 


of compulsory thoughts and compulsory acts. 
The analysis showed that she wished to prove her 
moral superiority over a sister. The sister was 
married, while our patient was tempted to enter 
into a liaison with a married man which experi- 
ence she felt as a degradation. She was, there- 
fore, according to her own opinion degraded in 
contrast to her sister. On the occasion of the 
death of her mother the masculine protest gave 
rise to a situation which again brought her up- 
permost, namely, her stronger grief for the sad 
event. 

In the history of civilization as in the neurosis, 
the tendency to atonement not rarely degener- 
ates into scourging, flagellation, ete. From the 
confessions of Rousseau and from private com- 
munications of healthy as well as neurotic indi- 
viduals, and furthermore from good observations 
of the behavior of children, as for example B. 
Asnaurow’s, we know that in certain individuals 
blows are capable of arousing sexual excitations. 
This is the real, somatically perceptible moment 
which exists in the makeup of these individuals 
and which determines the choice of a particular 
form of atonement. Patients have told me that 
in their childhood they experienced pleasure from 
blows on their buttocks, though it was terrible to 
them to be beaten. In the later life of these 
neurotics flagellation analogously with masturba- 


420 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


tion and all other forms of perversions is the 
visible expression of the fear of the opposite part- 
ner. I am indebted to a patient for the follow- 
ing communication. She had come under my 
care for severe migraine. Several years before 
the onset of the treatment she was subject to day- 
phantasies in which she saw herself detected in an 
act of infidelity and punished by a man to whom 
she thought herself married but who did not re- 
semble her real husband. As a sequel to this 
phantasy there followed a severe self-scourg- 
ing until she fell exhausted. This flagellation 
brought about intense sexual emotions. The 
analysis revealed that this woman hated her hus- 
band, a neurotic hatred, and in this hatred would 
have readily committed an act of infidelity m 
order to humiliate him thereby. Now she has 
gotten to be too old to be of any worth in sex 
matters, while in former years she was hindered 
by the masculine protest. For a short time be- 
fore she thought of flagellation, she played with 
phantasies of infidelity, but not without securing 
herself against a realization. ‘The detection by 
the husband, the flagellation and consequent 
auto-erotic gratification, all of this had its origin 
in the anticipatory craving for security and is but 
a play of phantasy which emphasizes in an espe- 
cially strong manner the fear of the man. The 
substitution of her husband by another is the re- 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 421 


sult of her derogatory tendency and equivalent 
to her wishes of infidelity, her husband is to be 
humiliated, another would be preferred in his 
stead. Continuing, she disavows this plausible 
assumption through an act of infidelity to this 
other one. In the course of years she gave up 
this flagellation. The derogatory tendency, 
however, is directed more vehemently against her 
husband as well as against all mankind. She de- 
veloped migraine as soon as she feared that she 
was losing hold of her domineering role over any 
one. Her disease succeeded too in enabling her 
to withdraw completely from society. Within 
her family circle she was absolute mistress as a 
result of her illness. She succeeded also in de- 
grading in a large measure her various family 
physicians, inasmuch as her migraine remained 
unimproved in spite of all their treatment. 
Even morphine failed in its effect, and I might 
recommend that a perverse reaction to this rem- 
edy in any case should receive special attention. 
I mention incidentally, as a supplement to the 
termination of the treatment that she also placed 
great obstacles in the way of my form of therapy 
and for a long time sought to expose me by re- 
taining her pain even when openly flattering me. 
Patients recover as soon as they understand that 
this motive of adhering to their disease is for the 
purpose of humiliating the physician. 


422 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Incidentally, I will refer to the fact that ac- 
cording to my experience, “religious insanity,” 
phantasies and hallucinations of God, heaven and 
the saints, as well as the feeling of being crushed 
are to be understood as infantile megalomanic 
ideas of these patients and as an expression of 
their feeling of superiority over their environ- 
ment. There is often connected with this a hos- 
tile feeling against the environment, as is the case 
when a catatonic permits himself to be com- 
manded by God to give his attendant a box on 
the ear or to overturn a bed or a table, or when 
he tries to compel his Jewish relatives to submit 
to baptism. The soaring in manics, the dements’ 
grandiose ideas are parallel phenomena and in- 
dicate the buried feeling of humiliation which 
demands over-compensation in the psycho- 
sis.* 

In practice physicians often come across chil- 
dren who aggravate symptoms and simulate in 
order to escape oppression at the hands of their 
parents. How closely these phenomena border 
on unfaithfulness without entirely coinciding 
with it is self-apparent. Remarkable, however, 
is the concomitant manifestation of signs of som- 

2 Paul Bjerre (“Zur Radicalbehandlung der chronischen Para- 
noia,” Wien und Leipzig, Deuticke, 1912) was the first to describe 


in a convincing manner the significance of the masculine protest 
and of the craving for security in the psychosis. 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 423 


atic inferiority, as well as the emergence of the 
neurotic character-development, and hence the 
neurotic disposition. As examples, three cases 
of observations of neurotic children are given. 
A seven years old girl came under my care for 
periodical attacks of gastric pain and nausea. 
We found a frail, poorly developed child who 
suffered from struma cystica, adenoids and en- 
larged tonsils. Her voice had a hoarse intona- 
tion. Upon inquiry her mother stated that the 
child often suffered from catarrhal troubles ac- 
companied by a cough, which were unusually 
protracted, as well as from protracted attacks of 
dyspepsia. Her present complaint had existed 
about a half year, without any demonstrable or- 
ganic affection. Along with this her appetite 
and bowel functions remained normal. ‘The 
gastric pains developed since the girl began at- 
tending school. Her progress in school was an 
excellent one, but the teacher had repeatedly ex- 
pressed wonder over the striking ambitiousness 
of the child. She was very sensitive about ad- 
monitions and felt herself slighted for a sister 
who was three and one-half years her junior. 
What especially attracted her mother’s attention 
was a definite lengthening of the clitoris, one of 
the genital anomalies, the importance of which as 
a sign of inferiority I have already emphasized 
here, and which was later on discovered by Bartel 


424 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


and Kyrle and emphasized by them as very char- 
acteristic. Her skin was everywhere hypersensi- 
tive, and the tickling reflex noticeably accentu- 
ated. The child frequently asked to be tickled. 
The child’s anxiousness exceeded the normal. 
The irregularity of the incisors is to be looked 
upon as a further indication of a somatic inferior- 
ity, which points to a defect of the gastro-intesti- 
nal tract. The pharyngeal reflex was definitely 
exaggerated. 

One gains the impression from this ensemble 
of phenomena, that the reflex activity of the ali- 
mentary canal was likewise exaggerated. As a 
matter of fact the child had vomited frequently 
during the first three years of her life. The fre- 
quent dyspeptic attacks likewise indicate an in- 
feriority of the gastro-intestinal tract. Along 
with this she had suffered for about a year from 
eczema of the buttocks,—at the termination of 
the inferior alimentary canal, with itching which 
lasted for several months and which was cured by 
the family physician by means of suggestion and 
with the assistance of a neutral salve. 

The painful pressure in the stomach proved to 
be a psychic reflex which set in whenever the child 
feared a humiliation at school or at home.? 


2R. Stern has described similar phenomena, of which we have 
already spoken frequently in this book, as preactive tensions 
(practive Spannungen). According to my conception we are 
dealing here with a planful, albeit unconscious utilization of reflex 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 425 


The purpose of this reflex which had been con- 
structed on the basis of somatic inferiority lay in 
the effort to avoid punishment and to direct the 
attention of the somewhat harsh mother who pre- 
ferred the younger girl. After the inner per- 
ception of this heightened reflex activity, there 
was obviously fixation and aggravation as soon 
as the child sought a guiding idea which she could 
use for the purpose of maximating her ego-con- 
sciousness. On account of the brevity of the 
treatment I was able to discover no spontaneous 
expressions of traces of ideas concerning a future 
gravidity, as the anticipated destiny of a fem- 
inine role. The attacks vanished after a short 
time, after I had explained the connection to the 
child. A dream after one of these attacks points 
in the above described direction. She dreamed: 


“My friend was below. Then we played with 
each other.” 


Her friend was a preferred rival in the school. 
Conflicts often resulted, without blows however. 
She lived on the floor above and they always 
played in the apartment of the patient. But the 
form of expression in the dream she related was 
sufficiently remarkable. When I asked this in- 
telligent child if one would say “her friend was 


irritability of inferior organs, with intelligent reflexes (“Intell- 
gente Reflexe”). 


426 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


below” when the person who related the story 
was playing with her, she connected herself im- 
mediately, and said “she was with me.” But we 
will assume that the form of expression is right 
and the accent is on the “below,” then behind this 
is concealed the thought that the rival was under 
the ambitious patient as in a conflict. “The 
friend was below” then means “I was above,” a 
conception as result of which we are able to de- 
fine the standpoint of the patient. The “then” 
also points in the same direction. It only has 
meaning when we assume that there is an inter- 
val between the two dream pictures, such as per- 
haps: “I must first be superior to my friend, 
then I will play with her.” 

The history which preceded the attack which 
followed furnished a confirmation of our concep- 
tion. ‘The game of the two girls was as a rule 
playing “father and mother” or “playing doc- 
tor.” In the first game there was a quarrel be- 
tween the two girls as to who should be “father” 
until the father finally took a hand and re- 
proached the patient that her companion was al- 
ways more yielding than she, which was the truth. 
The friend thereupon received the part of father. 
When the family shortly afterwards seated them- 
selves at the table, the child was seized with an 
attack. She ate nothing and was put to bed 
and in fact in her parents’ room, where at other 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 427 


times her other rival slept, her little sister. The 
dream now expresses a continuation of the same 
tendency which was served by the attack and fur- 
nishes us a hint concerning the patient’s equal 
valuation of her desire for masculinity and her 
craving to assert her worth. The representation 
of the feminine part as that of the subordinate 
or the one who is beneath in the word, “under,” 
strengthens this view greatly, but not without 
giving rise to the suspicion that the patient knows 
the position during coitus. She slept before the 
arrival of the younger sister in her parents’ room 
and even later whenever she was ill. This sus- 
picion expressed in the presence of the mother 
remained uncontradicted, but had as result that 
both the children were kept permanently out of 
the parents’ room. But here we see again how 
the character-traits of this child were active in the 
direction of the masculine protest, functionating 
as distantly placed outposts whose object it was 
to secure her at a distance against every analogy, 
every symbolic experiencing of a female destiny, 
degradation, minimizing of the ego-consciousness, 
and furthermore, to protect her from all future 
misfortune. 

A similar affection well known to physicians 
is the school-nausea and nausea at table or shortly 
after eating which resembles the above described 
disease in its psychic constitution in that it rep- 


428 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


resents an unconscious expedient or one which 
has become unconscious for the purpose of avoid- 
ing a threatened humiliation and for the purpose 
of asserting one’s own worth. 

A 13 years old boy had shown for the past three 
years a remarkable indolence, which prevented 
his progress at school, notwithstanding his indis- 
putable intelligence. For several months past 
he had been manifesting a sort of lamenting habi- 
tus which would especially come to light when- 
ever he was admonished for any cause whatever. 
His father and mother had probably always been 
a little too harsh with him, but as far as I could 
obtain information their admonitions only re- 
ferred to his slowness in eating and dressing and 
to his eagerness for reading. Lately things had 
come to such a pass that the boy began to cry 
whenever he was reminded of anything or when 
any one hurried him. The result of this condi- 
tion was a more cautious attitude on the part of 
the parents, though they thought they could not 
dispense with admonitions entirely on account of 
the sluggishness of the boy. 

An inquiry concerning his last fit of weeping 
showed that he had been admonished to hurry to 
school, after he had been striving for half an 
hour before the glass to brush his stubborn hair 
smooth. ‘The analysis showed that he saw him- 
self nearing difficulty and wished to secure him- 





SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 429 


self against painful humiliations by careful meas- 
ures. He reproached himself severely with 
childish sex indiscretions which he had committed 
in company with other boys and girls. Above 
all he feared discovery by his parents and this 
fear reached an extraordinary degree when one 
night during a somnambulistic experience he en- 
tered the servant’s room and to his great sur- 
prise found himself in the morning in the cook’s 
empty bed. This sleep-walking was, as in all 
other cases which I have been able to penetrate, 
the result of the masculine protest against the 
feeling of humiliation. The day before he was 
transferred from the intermediary to the ele- 
mentary school because of poor progress. ‘The 
impression which this scene made upon him was 
so great, the fear that he might betray during his 
somnambulistic experiences, the secrets between 
him and his friends, because like all other som- 
nambulists he talked in his sleep, was so terrify- 
ing that it led him to very strong measures of 
security. The thoughts were first in regard to 
his erections which he sought to conceal carefully 
from his parents. This he accomplished by a 
downward stroking of his erected penis with his 
hand. By this time the craving for security had 
taken possession of him to such an extent that 
he treated the hair which stubbornly persisted in 
standing up as if it were a sexual organ, as in 


430 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


fact the craving for security always reaches be- 
yond what is absolutely necessary. In this case 
we see the modest beginning of a compulsory act 
whose mechanism regularly consists in a repre- 
sentation of the masculine protest or in the crav- 
ing for security directed towards it. The latter 
becomes the content and motive force of the com- 
pulsion neuroses when the masculine protest goes 
too far and is threatened to fall into femininity 
through inner contradictions, because the conse- 
quences would be a punishment, a degradation 
or embarrassment. Itis then, that the safety de- 
vice itself seems to be the more masculine, al- 
though the alluring feeling of triumph may not 
be produced. Under certain circumstances how- 
ever the same results may be attained by a fight- 
ing against desire in every form, so that a power- 
ful asceticism is valued as a triumph. 

As a matter of fact, ascetic leanings as varie- 
ties of self torture, found a place in this boy’s 
craving for security, and this disinclination to 
eat had for its object analogously to abstinence 
the checking of his outcropping sexual instincts. 
The boy who, apart from this, was weak became 
so reduced that the parents were obliged to inter- 
fere. ‘Thus they came upon his craving for se- 
curity which he had gratified with so much diffi- 
culty. Then the psychomotor familiarity with 
the attacks of the parents led to security through 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 431 


crime as a result of which his value again became 
enhanced. 

His eagerness to read also originated from his 
craving for security. The insecurity which had 
seized him at puberty compelled him to seek com- 
fort, instruction and a reassuring fear of disease 
in the encyclopedia. He was incredibly well 
read on the problems in question. Once fairly 
on the way to seek security in books, he overdid 
the thing because the elder brothers and sisters 
whom he emulated were remarkable readers, also 
because he acted against his parents, his oppres- 
sors in doing this; and thirdly because he was able 
to satisfy his original masculine protest in this 
way and follow the heroes of his books in danger 
and conflict, which was shown by his choice of 
reading matter—he preferred Karl May. 

The third case was that of an eleven years old 
boy who suffered from a psychically determined 
protracted pertussis and who at that time still 
suffered from enuresis. He was an intractable 
child who wished to attach his father to himself 
while he tried to avoid his step-mother as a cruel 
persecutor. The receptive disposition of the 
father was manifested in his extreme solicitude 
during attacks of whooping cough. One morn- 
ing as the mother again reproached the boy be- 
cause he had wet his bed, he jumped laughingly 
out of bed and ran about the room undressed 


432 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


until the solicitous father with an indignant re- 
mark to the mother carried the breathless boy 
back to bed. A severe fit of coughing which re- 
sembled whooping cough, from which he had just 
recovered, closed this scene and caused a quarrel 
between the married couple. When the boy 
again went to bed in the evening, he sprang up in 
an excited manner and galloped back and forth 
so that he again became breathless. ‘The mean- 
ing of the attack was quite obvious. The boy 
wished to again provoke reproaches against the 
step-mother and to draw the father to his side. 
A suggestive treatment and an explanation of the 
purpose of the attack brought about a cessation 
of same, but the pertussis still dragged on for 
half a year longer. 

Analogous mechanisms are at the foundation 
of the idea of suicide. ‘The deed itself is usually 
wrecked on the knowledge of the inner contradic- 
tions of this form of the masculine protest. ‘The 
psychic change results from the thought of death, 
of non-existence, the humiliating feeling of being 
about to become dust, of wholly losing one’s per- 
sonality. Where there are checks of a religious 
nature, they are merely the husks, a recoil as 
though this action too were a punishment. 
Hamlet, up to our time the model of a person 
who doubts of his manliness, of the psychic her- 
maphrodite, who consciously represents to him- 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 433 


self in reassuring forethought the limitations of 
his manly protest, who rebels against his femi- 
nine line, and not without evading the dialectical 
change to the manly line, protects himself from 
suicide by conjuring up the dreams, “To sleep, 
perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub, for in that 
sleep of death what dreams may come, when we 
have shuffled off this mortal coil.” In the grave- 
yard scene a real horror was manifested because 
Yorick’s skull was of no more value than the 
others’. 

I have for some time defended the view that 
suicide is one of the strongest forms of masculine 
protest and represents a security from humilia- 
tion by withdrawal. The cases accessible to me 
of attempts at suicide have always revealed the 
neurotic structure in their psyche. Signs of 
somatic inferiority, feelings of uncertainty and 
inferiority from childhood, a psychic structure 
which is felt to be effeminate, and the overtense 
masculine protest answering to this feeling of 
effeminacy were manifested in the same manner 
as in every neurotic. A nearer or more remote 
example shows the trend. The most powerful 
psychic hold originates from the thoughts of 
death in childhood which produce a constant pre- 
disposition to suicide by shaping the psychic 
physiognomy under the influence of the egotistic 
idea. In the previous history of would-be sui- 


434 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


cides the same tendencies are fond of trying to 
attain influence by illness, by attempting or by 
dwelling on the thoughts of death, dreaming of 
the mourning of relatives to obtain satisfaction 
in a situation of humiliation or when there are 
feelings of despised love. And the idea becomes 
deed in a similar situation of the reduction of the 
feeling of self-esteem, as soon as this loss leads to 
a strong reduction of the worth of life and is able 
to cause the dialectical change of the masculine 
idea of suicide to be overlooked in the case of a 
recent humiliation. Thus we must concede that 
those writers are correct who see in suicide a pro- 
cess allied to the insane constructions. My 
studies and those of Bartel’s on the inferiority 
of organ, especially the inferiority of the sexual 
apparatus, are in harmony with this. 

In the neuroses the probability of a correction 
is stronger, if it does not always prevent suicide. 
It seems, that the profound consideration of the 
problem of suicide which with the neurotic usu- 
ally lasts for years is in itself a sign and at the 
same time a contributory cause of the correction. 
And in fact the deeds and thoughts of neurotics 
are full of thoughts of death. Here is the dream 
of a neurotic who was under treatment on ac- 
count of stuttering and psychic impotence, dur- 
ing a night after he had waited in vain for a let- 
ter from his bride: 


SELF-REPROACHES, SELF-TORTURE, ETC. 435 


“I thought I was dead. My relatives stood 
about the coffin and conducted themselves as 
though they were in despair.” 


The patient remembered having often had 
thoughts in childhood that he would like to die 
because his parents preferred his younger 
brother. He had always been persecuted by the 
thought that because of hydrocele and because of 
smallness of the genital organs he was inferior 
and would have no children. Later he thought 
to protect himself by humiliation of women and 
great distrust of them to protect himself against 
them and unhappiness in marriage. In reality 
he felt too weak and was afraid of women. Just 
as he feared this test in marriage he avoided all 
decisions through a factor which had become 
motor. His impotence set in when he received 
a favorable answer from his bride, as an excuse, 
an expedient to postpone marriage. In the 
dream, the thought that his bride might prefer 
another is reflected. With this was connected 
an attempt at a solution by means of which he 
could divert her whole love to himself, in which, 
as in the arrangement of his impotence the possi- 
bility of marriage was eliminated. 


CHAPTER X 


THE NEUROTIC’S ESPRIT DE FAMILLE, REFRACTOR- 
INESS AND OBEDIENCE, SILENCE AND LOQUA- 
CIOUSNESS, THE TENDENCY TO CONTRARINESS. 


In this chapter I will refer to another series of 
character-traits displayed by neurotics, such as 
are often found in the foreground of psychoan- 
alytic observations where they merely influence 
the external picture of the neurosis. They 
merely assist in constructing the neurotic indi- 
viduality, but just on this account may lend to 
the special neurosis a particular direction, or may 
provoke a definite fate in the conflict with the 
environment. Thus it may happen that the neu- 
rotic’s esprit de famille may be revealed in an 
especially obtrusive manner, that genealogical in- 
vestigations may fill a part of the neurotic’s 
thinking, which conceals more deeply seated 
traits, often of the nature of an unjustifiable 
pride of ancestry, which is then utilized as a 
striving against the social obligations which go 
with sexual relations and marriage, similarly as 
the hunting out of heredity of disease is utilized. 


This readily succeeds through an arrangement of 
436 


THE NEUROTIC’S ESPRIT DE FAMILLE 437 


extreme affection for certain members of the 
family, or for the entire family. This affection 
originates from the compulsion of the same guid- 
ing fiction with its internal contradiction upon 
which the fear of decisions and of the sexual part- 
ner rests. ‘This expedient then serves the pur- 
pose of gaining mastery over the family circle, 
for which purpose the family bond is taken as 
something holy. In neurotics the break with the 
family borders on the esprit de famille, as soon as 
the craving for security makes itself felt more 
strongly and requires proof that it is impossible 
to depend even on blood relations. Misanthropy 
as an abstract guiding line and refuge in solitude 
are then not rare occurrences and are plainly re- 
vealed in the psychosis. 

The subordination of the character-traits to 
the guiding fiction may be seen especially clearly 
in the antithetical traits of refractoriness and 
obedience,’ which singly or intermingled in vary- 
ing degrees contribute much to the coloring of the 
neurotic psyche. Insight into the construction 
of these character-traits, which have been ab- 
stracted from neutral, actual impressions of the 
pre-neurotic period and have then been neuroti- 
cally grouped and worked over into guiding 
lines, teaches us much concerning the origin, the 
meaning and purpose of a given character. 


1 Adler, Trotz und Gehorsam, I. c. 


438 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The idea of a congenital origin of “character,” 
is untenable because the real substratum for the 
formation of psychic character and whatever part 
thereof may be congenital, is metamorphosed 
under the influence of the guiding idea until this 
idea is satisfied. Both refractoriness and obedi- 
ence are only attitudes which reveal to us the 
jump from the uncertain past into the protecting 
future, as are all other character-traits. 

Timidity as an attitude of the fear of decisions 
is often accompanied in neurotics by the trait of 
uncommunicability. These devices work in the 
manner of an isolation which has for its purpose 
the withdrawal from the environment of the 
points of contact. The neurotic who persists in 
silence sometimes shows his superiority and de- 
rogatory tendency also in the role of kill-joy, or 
he arranges through his silence and apparent 
want of ideas the proof that he is not the equal of 
others, especially when these are in the majority, 
and that he is especially unfit for marriage. In 
the taking up and accentuating the antithesis of 
the above, loquaciousness, I have at times discov- 
ered the proof for the conviction that the mdi- 
vidual cannot keep a secret. Another form of 
attack and detraction is found in the loud, im- 
patient manner which many neurotics have of in- 
terrupting others. The object is often more ob- 
vious from the circumstance that he introduces 


THE NEUROTIC’S ESPRIT DE FAMILLE 489 


every remark with a “No” or a “But” or an “On 
the contrary.” 

A trait of character to which the neurosis owes 
much of its definiteness and significance, which 
is always present and which, together with 
refractoriness and negativism, belongs to the 
strongest forms of expression of the masculine 
protest, is the tendency to desire to have every- 
thing different or turned around. This trait is 
found in the compensatory efforts as well as in 
the striving after neurotic expedients, it exists 
in the disputatiousness and in the neurotic de- 
rogatory tendency and possesses an enormous 
applicability for the conflict with the environ- 
ment. It is the counterpart of the frequently 
observed conservative, pedantic nature of the 
neurotic and like it permits him to confirm his 
thirst for mastery. The striving for change and 
revolution is found at the root of the masculine 
protest, when the latter is constructed according 
to an antithesis. “The essential of all feminine 
dialectic is said to be: to wish everything differ- 
ent,’ announces E. Fuchs in “Die Frau in der 
Karikatur.” In dress, morals, attitude, and 
movement, something bizarre is always revealed, 
usually with some pretext. One of my patients 
often turned herself around in sleep in such a 
way that when she awoke she found herself lying 
in the opposite direction. In waking hours also 


440 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


she sought to turn everything upside down. 
One of her favorite phrases was, “On the con- 
trary,” as an objection to the opinion of others. 
The wish to be above, to ride, to wear the pants 
is often found to be expressed in patients of this 
sort in an extraordinarily clear manner. In the 
psychotherapeutic treatment this trait is mani- 
fested from beginning to end, as is the case with 
negativism in catatonics, may be always antici- 
pated and extends to the most trivial things. 
Very often these neurotic tendencies to contrari- 
ness are manifested in the form of a notion that 
the physician could come to the patient, not the 
patient to the physician. Predictions should as 
a rule be avoided in the treatment of neurotics, 
but where there is a strong tendency to turn 
things around the physician will always be put 
in the wrong. 

The effort is constantly made to make up- 
down; right-left; before-behind, because the guid- 
ing fiction demands symbolically the turning 
around, that is, the changing from feminine to 
masculine. Words and writing are turned 
around (mirror writing), morality, sexual con- 
duct, dreams are turned into opposites and fol- 
low in reverse sequence and sometimes playfully, 
but at other times offensively, thoughts are 
turned around. The expedient which is to pre- 


THE NEUROTIC’S ESPRIT DE FAMILLE 441 


serve a masculine line of conduct has accordingly 
something of the nature of fury. 

The application of this “On the contrary” 
(Umgekehrt) in superstition, perhaps for the 
purpose of cheating fate by expecting the oppo- 
site of what one would like is a frequent trait in 
neurotics, reveals their complete insecurity, takes 
us back to the neurotic cautiousness and permits 
the recognition of the tremendous significance 
and wide scope which this attains in the psyche 
of the neurotic.” 

About this nucleus of cautiousness may be 
grouped, according to the exactions of the guid- 
ing ideal, traits of truthfulness or untruthfulness 
as the particular situation may demand. They 
always express the striving after full masculinity, 
sometimes directly, at other times by circuitous 
ways. Closely related to these are traits of de- 
ception and frankness, the first characteristic 
originating clearly in a feeling of inferiority, of 
being under. A strong anticipatory craving for 
security is revealed by the traits of hypersensi- 
tiveness to pain and suffering which keeps the in- 
dividual as well as the environment reminded that 
he can only choose those situations in life which 
can be endured without pain. It goes without 
saying that the anticipation of labor pains often 

2See also Adler, “Syphilidophobia,” 1. c. 


442 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


enters into the construction of this guiding line. 
The neurotic’s phenomena of doubt, of vacilla- 
tion and of lack of decision which have been so 
frequently emphasized in this book are related to 
cautiousness. ‘They always set in when reality 
influences the guiding fiction in such a manner 
that contradictions constantly emerge in the lat- 
ter, when the danger of a defeat, of a loss of pres- 
tige, is threatened by reality. There are then, 
generally speaking, three ways open to the neu- 
rotic, which depend upon the strength of the fic- 
titious guiding goal, so that the developed neu- 
rosis assumes an aspect in correspondence with 
one of these. The first way is by fixing the 
doubt and vacillation as a basis of operation, as 
is most frequently found in neurasthenics and 
psychasthenics, the tendency to doubt. The sec- 
ond way leads to the psychosis by means of which 
under the construction of a feeling of truth,? the 
fiction is hypostasized, deified. ‘The third way 
leads to a formal change of the fiction under an 
arrangement of anxiety, weakness, pain, etc., in 
short to a neurotic, circuitous way in which femi- 
nine means are employed to attain the purposes 
of the masculine protest. 

3 Kanabich, “Zur Pathologie der Intellectuellen Emotionen” 


(“Psychotherapia,” edited by v. N. Wiroboff, Moskau, 1911), ap- 
proached this thought very closely. 


CONCLUSION 


Our study has shown that man’s character- 
traits and their principal function in the life of 
the individual are manifested as expedients, in 
the nature of guiding lines for the thinking, feel- 
ing, willing, and acting of the human psyche, and 
that they are brought into stronger relief so soon 
as the individual strives to escape from the phase 
of uncertainty to the fulfillment of his fictitious 
guiding idea. The material for the construction 
of the character-traits is contained in the psychic 
totality and congenital differences vanish before 
the uniform effect of the guiding fiction. Goal 
and direction, the fictitious purpose of the traits 
of character may be best recognized in the orig- 
inal, direct, aggressive lines. Want and diffi- 
culties of life lead to alterations of character, so 
that only such constructions find favor as stand 
in harmony with the individual’s ego-idea. In 
this manner are formed the more cautious, the 
more hesitating character-traits which show a 
deviation from the direct line, but examination 
of which reveals their dependence upon the guid- 
ing fiction. 

443 


444 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


The neuroses and psychoses are attempts at 
compensation, constructive creations of the 
psyche which result from the accentuated and too 
highly placed guiding ideal of the inferior child. 
The uncertainty of these children in regard to 
their future and their success in life forces them 
to stronger efforts and reassurances in their fic- 
titious life plan. ‘The more fixed and rigid their 
guiding picture, their individual categorical im- 
perative, the more dogmatically they draw the 
guiding lines of their lives. ‘The more cautiously 
they proceed in this, the further they weave these 
threads of thought beyond their own person out 
into the future and organize on their peripheral 
ends where contact with the external world is to 
take place, those traits of character which are 
required to serve as outposts for their psychic 
predispositions. With its extraordinary sensi- 
tiveness the neurotic trait of character fastens 
itself to reality in order to change it according 
to the egoistic ideal, or in order to subject it to 
the same. Should defeat threaten, the neurotic 
predispositions and symptoms come into force. 

The slight significance of the congenital sub- 
stratum as far as the formation of character is 
concerned arises also from the fact that the guid- 
ing fiction only collects and unites into a group 
those psychic elements of which it can make use. 
It only collects those faculties and memories in 


CONCLUSION 445 


which results are promised for the attainment of 
the final goal. In the neurotic reformation of 
the psyche the guiding fiction has absolute do- 
minion and makes use of experience according 
to its own bent, as if the psyche were a motion- 
less, concrete mass. It is only when the neurotic 
perspective becomes effective, when the neurotic 
character and predispositions are fully developed 
and the way to the guiding goal is assured that 
we recognize the individual as neurotic. It is 
then that the neurotic psyche teaches us more 
clearly than does the normal! that, “Through the 
great being which surrounds and penetrates us, 
there is a great becoming which strives toward a 
completed being.” (Durch das grosse Sein, das 
uns umgibt und weit in uns hineinreicht, zieht 
sich ein grosses Werden, das dem vollendeten 
Sein zustrebt.) Thus we find that “character,” 
which has found its utility through the guiding 
ideal is something like an intelligent pattern 
(intelligente Schablone) which is made use of 
by the craving for security as well as by the affect 
and disease predispositions. It is the task of 
comparative individualistic psychology to com- 
prehend the meaning of these models, as Breuer 
has begun to understand them in their genetic, 
and in our sense, analogical construction, to re- 
gard them as a symbol of a life plan, as a simile. 
For through the analysis of character by means 


446 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


of which the line which ever soars toward the 
guiding ideal may always be followed, we find 
compressed in one point the past, present, future, 
and the desired goal. 

One will always find that neurotics cling te- 
naciously to their reassuring ideals. The de- 
fense of them becomes accentuated because the 
patient in abandoning his ideal as well as by a 
change in direction of his life plan brought about 
by another anxiously anticipates a defeat, a sub- 
ordination, an emasculation. The next step in 
the therapeutic procedure will, according to this, 
have to be the removal of this strongly antithet- 
ical attitude, the resistance of the patient to the 
physician, and its revelation as a form of the old 
neurotic ideal, as the exaggerated masculine pro- 
test. 

Thus as a final word and as an explanation of 
our standpoint we may sum up as follows: In- 
ferior organs and neurotic phenomena are sym- 
bols of formative forces which strive to realize a 
self-constructed life plan by means of intense 
efforts and expedients. 


AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS REFERRED 
TO IN THIS BOOK 


Studie iiber Minderwertigkeit von Organen. Urban 
u. Schwarzenberg. Wien u. Berlin, 1907. 

Uber neurotische Disposition. Jahrbuch, Bleuler- 
Freud, 1909. 

Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und in der Neurose. 
Fortschritte der Medizin. Leipzig, 1908. 

Die Bedeutung der Organminderwertigkeitslehre fiir 
Philosophie und Psychologie. Vortrag in der Gesell- 
schaft für Philosophie an der Universität in Wien, 
1908. 

Myelodysplasie oder Organminderwertigkeit? 
Wiener med. Wochenschrift, 1909. 

Der psychische Hermaphroditismus im Leben und in 
der Neurose. Fortschr. d. Medizin, 1910. Leipzig. 

Trotz und Gehorsam. Monatschefte für Padagogik. 
Wien, 1910. 

Die psyche Behandlung der Trigeminusneuralgie. 
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse. Wiesbaden. Berg- 
man, 1910. 

Einerlogener Traum. Zentralblatt für Psychoan- 
alyse. Wiesbaden. Bergman, 1910. 

Uber männliche Einstellung bei weiblichen Neu- 
rotikern. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse. Wies- 


baden. Bergman, 1910. 
447 


448 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION 


Beitrag zur Lehre vom Widerstand. Zentralblatt 
für Psychoanalyse. Wiesbaden. Bergman, 1910. 

Syphilidophobie. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse. 
Wiesbaden. Bergman, 1910. 

Zur Determination des Charakters. Vortrag, gehal- 
ten in der Gesellschaft für Psychologie an der Uni- 
versität in Wien, 1909. 


THE END 


INDEX 


Accusation, self-, 272 Avenarius, 74 
Acquisitiveness, 12 Awkwardness, 212, 386 
Activity, 40, 279 
Adenoids, 8 
Adler, bibliography, 447 ER: Pe ae 10. 434 
Adultery > 216, 274 Baschkirzewa 261 
Affectivity, 10 Basedow 159° 
Aggressionstrieb, 2, 15, 80, 325, Pyshfulness, 96, 107, 184, 305 
iA ieh bia. 191 Baudelaire, 387 
enabupDia; Berger, Alfred v., 348 
Alcoholism, 381 Bern are 
Alexander, 339 B RE 


Algolagnia, 250 rer 
Ambition, 38, 97, 325, 347, 984 Bibliography, Adler, 447 


case, 341 Birks, Thiemich-, 9 
Ambivalency, 245 h n Biting of nails, 50 
Angio-neurotic diathesis, Krei- Bjerre, 422 ; 

9 


bich, 4 Blepharospasm, 181 


Anorexia, 212 
Anticipatory thinking, 389 at Re MESS NESS Eh eS 


Antithesis, the neurotic, 25, 31, ; 
33, 65, 86, 99, 106, 116, 150, Blindness, 212 


Bloch, 250 
ane hae 293, 334, 340, 345, Blushing, 49, 191, 213, 305, 365, 
Antivivisectionism, 328 STE NEN 209.070 
3 
penton et Bossi, 166 f 


Anxiety, 96, 151, 161, 163, 184, 
242, 272, 347, 374, 381 
cases, 165, 195, 226, 284,301 pradytropiy, & 
Apperception, neurotic mode ida ses 
of, 32, 42, 127, 227 , 
Aprosexia, 8 
Aristotle, 25, 339 


Bouchard, 4 


Burgkmair, 339 


Arrogance, 283 Capriciousness, 244 

Asceticism, 208, 412, 417, 430 Carelessness, 260 

As. If, Philosophy of the, 30 Carus, 117 

Asthma, 122, 369 Cases, 130, 165, 177, 193, 220, 

Authoritativeness, 334 221, 226, 254, 264, 274, 284, 

Author’s bibliography, 447 290, 298, 299, 303, 338, 344, 

Avarice, 127, 152, 163, 186 370, 395, 418, 420, 423, 428, 
cases, 131 431 


449 


450 


Castration, phantasies, 376, 393 
Catarrh, 369 
Catatonia, case, 274 
Caution, 41, 161, 314, 384, 441 
Charcot, 56 
Chatrain, 118 
Chvostek, 9 
Claustrophobia, 191 
Cleanliness, 97 
Climacteric, 28, 154 
Clumsiness, 8, 52 
Colic, 122 
Comby, 4 
Compensation, 
Anton’s theory, 4 
psychic, 35 
through the central nervous 
system, 1, 18 
Compulsory ideas, 222, 383 
cases, 344, 348 
Conscience, 246, 324, 330, 347 
Conscientiousness, 96, 272 
Constancy, 361 
Constipation, 122, 177 
case, 165 
Constitutional inferiority, 8, 34, 
57 
Contentiousness, 
348 
Contrariness, 436 
Contrition, 412 
Convulsions, tetanoid, 9 
Coprology, 377 
Coprophilic phantasies, 394 
Coquetry, 128, 217, 246, 250 
Courage, 61, 97, 283 
Covetousness, 279 
Cowardice, 107, 283, 291, 342 
Craving for security, xv, 40, 41, 
56, 94, 99, 134, 163, 241, 
276, 351, 359, 368, 393, 417, 
431 
Criminality, 107, 208, 214, 329 
Critique, 127, 297 
Cruelty, 61, 107, 127, 324, 329 
Cryptorchism, 142, 197 
Cyclothymia, 389 
Czerny, 4, 10, 11, 369 


40, 44, 295, 


INDEX 


Darwin, 70 
Deaf-mutism, 8 
Deafness, 212 
Death, danger of, 28 
Deception, 283 
Defiance, case, 341 
Degeneracy, 9 
Deja vu, 88 
Delirium, 208 
Dementia precox, 267, 342, 358, 
389 
Demosthenes, 316 
Depreciation, of others, 
self-, 59 
N, 191, 213, 347, 370, 
i 
cases, 195, 348, 395 
Derogation, 127, 147, 281, 285, 
297, 334, 343, 363, 384, 396, 
421 
of man, 184 
Desire to dominate, 186 
Dessoir, 103 
Dexterities, 151, 184 
Diagram, of neurotic psyche, 73 
Difficulty of hearing, 8, 10 
Discontent, 281, 369, 384 
Disparagement, see Derogation 
Disposition zur Neurose, 264 
Disputatiousness, 185, 349, 369, 
439 
Distractibility, 10 
Distrust, 216 
Dogs, symbolic significance, 358 
Dostoyeffsky, 348 
Doubt, 97, 151, 162, 208, 261, 
297 
cases, 220, 349 
Dream theory, x 
Dreams, 39, 85, 108, 149, 163, 
187, 199, 204, 226, 253, 256, 
285, 286, 288, 294, 298, 300, 
303, 320, 339, 350, 354, 355, 
356, 357, 358, 371, 399, 405, 
425, 434 
of a single night, 356 
day, 369 
exhibition, 163, 237 
flying, 33, 339 


44; 


INDEX 


Dreams, of climbing stairs, 339 
of riding, 339 
sexual, 163 

Diirer, 339 

Dyspnoea, 185 


Eavesdropping, 197 
Economy, 97 
Effeminacy, 31, 40, 43, 61 
Ego-consciousness, 21, 27, 37, 
55, 62, 63, 76, 138, 289, 338, 
342, 354, 362, 374, 387, 425 
Egotism, 97, 107, 262 
Ejaculatio precox, 143, 367 
Emasculation, 281, 341 
Eneuresis, 10, 50, 212 
cases, 177, 284, 431 
Envy, 44, 61, 97, 127, 163, 186, 
232, 279, 325, 347 
Epicureanism, 417 
Epilepsy, 191, 192, 327 
case 176 
hystero-, case, 344 
Epochs, causative of neuroses 
and psychoses, 28 
Eppinger, 4 
Erckmann, 118 
Erythrophobia, 122 
Escherich, 4, 9 
Esprit de famille, 436 
Exactness, 97, 213 
Exaltation, 213 
Examinations, 28 
Exhibitionism, 237, 361, 
378, 395 
Exner, 93 
Exudative diathesis, 4, 290, 369 


377, 


Fainting, 213 
Fantasy, 85, 253 
Fatigue, 41, 185 
Fear, 184, 343 
of being alone, 184 
of decision, 383, 438 
of falling, 184 
of partner, 383, 385, 391, 392 
of places, 380, 406 
of reality, 89 
of society, 184, 380 


451 


Fear, of solitude, 380 
of wife, 383 

Feeble-mindedness, 10 

Feeling of inferiority, 1, 12, 17, 
27, 58, 60, 63, 85, 92, 100, 
164, 208, 211, 222, 253, 295, 
306, 330, 336, 338, 353, 
367, 374, 407 

case, 344 

Feeling of superiority, 21, 36, 
229, 320, 363, 417 

Fellatio, 242 

Fere, ix 

Ferrari, 329 

Fetichism, 209, 239, 260, 333, 
348, 378 

Finickiness, 186, 278 

Flagellation, 393, 412, 419 

Flies, 105, 212, 220 

Forgetfulness, 297 

Fortmuller, 271 

Fres-Meyerhof, 70 

Freud, viii, ix, x, xi, 6, 53, 69, 
76, 106, 108, 111, 147, 148, 
159, 171, 180, 203, 225, 226, 
261, 288, 296, 332 

Freytag, 83, 316 

Frigidity, 184, 218, 253 

Frischauf, 191, 313 

Fuchs, E., 439 

Fugues, 10, 216 


Gall, 117 

Gandharvs, 105 
Ganghofer, 404 

Genitals, malformation of, 9 
Genu valgus, 9 

Genu varus, 9 

Globus hystericus, 181 
Goethe, 38, 103, 118, 154 
Gogol, 410 

Gott, 9, 10 
Gourmandism, 13 

Greed, 12, 61, 97, 297, 325 
Grien, 339 

Grillparzer, 392 

Groos, 46, 55, 337, 376 
Gross, Otto, 4, 214 
Griiner, 277, 311 


452 


Guiding fiction, 22, 36, 54 
Guiding line, 42 
Guiding principle, 19, 29 


Habitus, torpid, 10 
Halban, 105 
Hallucinations, 39, 85, 91, 253, 
259, 265 
of pain, 341 
Halvan, 220 
Fiamburger, 11 
Hate, 44 
Headache, 122, 190, 191, E12 
370, 381 
cases, 338 
Hebel, 89 
Hermaphrodism, 236 
psychic, 102, 105, 208, 246, 
275, 345 
Herodotus, 65 
Hero-worship, 366 
Hertz, 409 
Hesitation, 97 
Hess, 4 
Heubner, 4 
Heyman, 214 
Hilfs constructionen, 
Safety-devices 
Hirschfeld, 238 
Hochwert, Frankl v., 9, 10 
Holtzknecht, 122 
Homer, 267 
Homosexuality, 32, 43, 240, 260, 
333, 361, 406 
Hydrocephalus, 9 
Hyperacusis, 202 
Hypersensitiveness, 344 
Hypochondriasis, 151, 242 
Hypophysis cerebri, 279 
Hysteria, 327 
Hystero-epilepsy, 344 


see 


Ibsen, 128, 212 
Ideal, ego, 384 
neurotic, 383 
Immermann, 211 
Immodesty, 237, 379, see also 
Exhibitionism 
Impatience, 40, 186, 281 


INDEX 


Impotence, 23, 41, 43, 61, 147, 
359, 367 

cases, 434 
Inaccessibility, 281 
Incest-complex, 208, 231, 305 

phantasies, 333, 386 
Inconstancy, 361 
Incontinence, of faeces, 9 

of urine, 9 
Indolence, 10, 40 
Industry, 97 
Infantile arthritism, Comby, 4 
Infantilism, 10 
Inferiority, literature of, 3 
Infidelity, 406 

phantasies of, 379 
Insatiableness, 232 
Insomnia, 186, 190, 216, 308, 

319, 383 

cases, 220, 258, 348, 352, 
Intolerance, 44 
Introduction, v 
Introspection, 97 
Irritability, 10 


395 


James, 56 

Janet, vi, vii, ix, 244, 413 

Jassny, 214, 329 

Jaureg, Wagner von, 824 

Jealousy, 216, 334, 357, 361, 
364, 370, 381, 384 

Jodl, 91 

Jöel, Karl, 340, 345 

Johannistrieb, 160 

Jones, E., 238, 313 


Kanabich, 442 

Kant, 54, 56, 69, 315, 346 
Kipling, ‘311 

Kisch, 162 
Kleptomania, 191, 211 
Krafft-Ebing, 105 
Kreibich, 4 

Kyrle, 5, 424 


Laziness, 41, 107, 341 
cases, 428 

Leonardo da Vinci, 179 

Leporelist, 210 


INDEX 


Lewdness, 381 
Libido, 62 
Lichtenberg, 109, 417 
Limping, 212 
Lingua scrotallis, 120 
Lipps, 315 
Litzmann, 212 
Liveliness, 10 
Lombroso, 18, 25, 152, 329 
Love, 208, 215 
Lying, pathological, 10 
mania, 209 
cases, 223 ‚ 
Lymphatism, Heubner’s, 4 


Malice, 192, 325 
Malthieu, Dr., 118 
Männliche Einstellung Weib- 
licher Neurotikes, 319 
Marczinowsky, 379 
Marriage, 28, 41 
Martius, 5 
Masculine goal, 15 
fr protest, 100, 103, 108, 
164, 178, 184, 213, 220, 226, 
246, 296, 334, 353, 369, 374, 
385, 394 
Masochism, 40, 260, 333, 359, 386 
cases, 326, 340 
Masturbation, 23, 50, 208, 222, 
273, 334, 359, 381, 414 
cases, 221, 233, 276, 292, 354, 
369, 373 
Megalomania, 97 
Meister, 103 
Melancholy, 161, 389 
Mendel, 159 
Menstruation, 28 
Meschede, 261 
Meyer, E. H., 105 
Meyerhoff, 32, 70 
Michaelis, 160 
Michel, 95 
Migraine, 122, 161, 191, 213, 308, 
317.7327 
cases, 195, 420 
Minus-variants, 4 
Misoneism, Lombroso’s, 18, 152 
Mistrust, 184, 357 


453 


Modesty, 96, 237, 260, 283, 361, 
374, 375 

Moebius, 248 

Moll, 240 

Moodiness, 10 

Morel, 9 

Moro, 4 

Moroseness, 10 

Morphine, failure of, 421 

Mother fixation, 114 

Myopathy, 11 

Myths, charm of, 387 


Naecke, 251 
Naevi, 8 
Narcissism, 246, 252, 377, 385, 
395 
Nausea, 185, 212 
cases, 165 
school, 427 
Necrophilia, 250 
Negativism, infantile, 177 
Neologisms, cases, 267 
Netslitzky, 10 
Neuralgia, 327 
cases, 308 
Neurotischen Disposition, 2, 317 
Neusser, von, 220 
Nietzsche, ix, 17, 24, 30, 61, 79, 
114, 169, 170, 397 
No, the neurotic, 349 
Nymphomania, 210 


Obedience, 436 
Obstinancy, 40, 60, 184, 232, 281, 
301 
cases, 284, 341 
Obstipation, see Constipation 
Oedipus complex, 64, 150, 189, 
191, 203 
Onanism, see Masturbation 
Oppenheim, 336 
Organ-inferiority, 7 
Organ-jargon, see 
jargon 
Overcompensation, psychic, 1, 
12 
Ovid, 239 


Somatic 


454 


Palpitation of heart, 185, 191, 
374 
Paralysis, 308, 381 
Paranoia, 267, 389 
litigious, 258 
Parsimony, 208 
Passivity, 40, 43 
Patricide, 348 
Paulsen, 52 
Pavor nocturnus, 10 
Pawlow, 67 
Pedantry, 60, 163, 246 
Penury, 208 
Persönlichkeitsgefühl, see Ego- 
consciousness 
Pertussis, cases, 431 
Perverse sexuality, 23 
Perversion, 324, 332, 361, 369, 
381, 393 
Pessimism, 151 
Pfaundler, 10 
Phantasy, see Fantasy 
Phantom pregnancy, 183 
Philosophy of the As If, 
Vaihinger, 30 
Phlegmatism, 10 
Phobias, see Fear 
Photophobia, 8 
Pineles, 9 
Plato, 346, 384 
Pliancy, 283 
Poggio, 409 
Pollution, 354, 367, 369, 406 
Poltauf, 4 
Polyuria, 185 
Ponflick, 4 
Porta, 117 
Potpeschnigg, 9 
Practical Part, 127 
Precocity, 8, 10, 232 
sexual, 23 
Preface, Author’s, iii 
Pregnancy, 28 
phantom, 183 
compulsory ideas, 185 
Preparation, psychic, 39, 48, 
92, 114 
Preuss’ Ke) Thasoo 
Pride, 61, 97, 370, 381 


INDEX 


Profession, choice of, 334 
Prostitution, 308 
phantasies, 379 
Protection, 
against coitus, 184, 185 
against courting, 184 
against maternal duties, 186 
against parturition, 185 
against pregnancy, 185 
against puerperium, 186 
Pseudomasochism, 260, 368 
Psychic hermaphrodism in life 
and the neuroses, 102, 180 
Psychischen Behandlung des 
Trigeminusneuralgie, 2, 212, 
313, 368 
Psychischen 
mus, 2 
Puerperium, 28 
Punctuality, 361 
Pyromania, 326 
Pythagoras, 25 


Hermaphroditis- 


Querulousness, 295 


Rage, paroxysms of, 10 

Raimann, 244 

Rakowiza, Helen, 261 

Recurrence of the 
Nietzsche, 17 

Reflexes, exaggerated, 10 

conditioned, 12 

Refraction, anomalies of, 8 

Refractoriness, 436 

Reich, J., 316 

Religiosity, 41, 422 

Remorse, 347, 348 

Restlessness, 10 

Return of the identical, Nietz- 
sche, 397 

Revengefulness, 61, 192 

Rickets, 9, 279, 338 

Rochefoucauld, 140, 326 

Roughness, 143, 270 

Round shoulders, 9 


identical, 


Sadism, 23, 44, 143, 186, 192, 
240, 325, 332, 333, 359 
Safety-devices, xii, 87, 117 


INDEX 


Sand, George, 287 
Scheme, neurotic, 184 
Schmidt, 9, 120 
Schopenhauer, 105, 248, 388 
Schreber, case of, 261 
Schrenck-Notzing, 250 
Schumann, Clara, 212, 316 
Scoliosis, 9 
Self-accusation, 272, 412 
Self-confidence, 88 
Self-preservation, 70 
Self-reproach, 348 
Self-torture, 412 
Senile neuroses, 127, 154 
Sensitiveness, 369 
cases, 341 
Sentiment d’incompletude, of 
Janet, vi 
Sexual guiding lines, 90 
Sexual perversions, 142, 240, 254 
inferiority, 166 
Sexual precocity, 23 
activity, 28 
anomalies, 27, 63 
Sexuality and death, 401 
as a jargon, 64, 158, 204, 237, 
293, 337, 353, 369 
Shame, 96 
Shamelessness, 376, see also Ex- 
hibitionism 
Shiller, 69 
Sicherungstendenz, see Craving 
for security 
Silberer, 72 
Silence, 381, 436 
Simmel, 248 
Simplicity, 260 
Simulation, 208, 281 
Singer, 122 
Siphilidophobia, 234, 315, 321, 
407, 441 
Sleep, disturbances of, 10 
Sleepiness, 10, 191 
Socrates, 96 
Somatic inferiority, 1, 2, 412 
Somatic jargon, 127, 176, 179, 
259 
Somnambulism, 10, 334 
Spasmophilia, Escherich, 4 


455 


Spasms, sphincters, 181 
vocal cords, 181 
Speech-defect, 8, 10 
Sperm glands, anomalies of, 
279 
Splitting of consciousness, 128, 
260 
Squints, 10 
Staggering gait, 186 
Stammering, cases, 130 
Stature, anomalies of, 9 
Status thymico-lymphaticus, 
220 
in suicide, 
Baitel, 5 
Stekel, 201, 329 
Stendhal, 404 
Stern, R., 424 
Stinginess, 12 
Strabismus, 8 
Stransky, 11 
Strindberg, 248 
Strümpell, 4, 244, 290, 369 
Studie über Mindwertigkeit von 
Organen,eil, ple os 1, Il, 
15, 72, 116, 166, 265, 288, 
300 
Stupidity, 10 
Stuttering, 8, 50, 191, 212, 305 
cases, 298, 434 
Submissiveness, 283, 386 
Sucking, 50 
thumb, 121 
Suggestibility, 43, 244 
Suicides, 29, 308, 312, 412, 432, 
status-lymphaticus in, 10 
juvenile, 10 
cases, 220, 284, 395 
Suspiciousness, 127 
Symbols, as a jargon, x, 30, 122, 
340 


10; Poltauf, 4, 


Sympathy, 246, 314 


Tardiness, 297 
Telepathy, 85 
Tetanoid convulsions, 9 
Theoretical part, 1 
Thiemich-Birks, 9 
Thirst, excessive, 191 


456 


Thriftiness, 186 
Thymus-anomalies, 279 
Thyroid anomalies, 279 
Ties, 10 

Timidity, 10 

Tolstoi, 409 

Tooth-motive, 115 
Tremor, 213, 354 

Trotz und Gehorsam, 16, 52, 437 
Truancy, 10 

Tyranny, 97, 349, 357, 406 


Ueber neurotische Disposition, 
271 
Uncertainty, 102, 196, 386, 403 

Unchastity, 248 
Unfaithfulness, 248 
Ungainliness, 8 
Unruliness, 301 
Unsociability, 10 


Vaginismus, 181, 184 
Vagotonia, Hess-Eppinger, 4 
Vaihinger, 30, 36, 37, 77, 99, 
169, 170, 315, 405 

Valgus, genu, 9 
Varus, genu, 9 
Vegetarianism, 328 
Vertigo, 122 

cases, 165, 405 
Vinci, Leonardo da, 179 
Virchow, iv, 9 


INDEX 


Vomiting, 121, 122, 185 
Von Neusser, 220 
Voyeur, 360 


Wagner, Richard, 205, 402 

Wagner v. Jaureg, 324 

Wanderlust, 210 

Weakness, 381, 385 

Weber, Parkes, 214 

Weeping fits, 381 

Weininger, 105, 248 

Werles, Gregor, 128 

Wernicke, 386 

Wild duck, 128 

Wild oats, 107 

Wildness, 281, 301 

Will to be above, Nietzsche, 
346 

Will to be up, Nietzsche, 337, 
339, 353 

Will to power, Nietzsche, 24, 32, 
41, 71, 93, 129, 132, 231, 
348 

Will to seem, 30, 296 

Willfulness, 184 

Winking, 50 

Woman, 388, 408 


Yauregg, Wagner v., 9 
Younger brother, 191 


Ziehen, 67 


THE END 


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